Synchronicity

The band that spent five albums fusing reggae and punk into something jittery and bright signed off with a record where the anxiety underneath finally surfaces and swallows the polish.

"Every Breath You Take" is the trick at the center: a wedding-dance staple that is actually a surveillance threat, its stalking possessiveness disguised by that circular, hypnotic guitar figure. Sting spends the rest of the album picking at dread rather than romance — the two-part title tracks pull Jung's coincidence theory into a suburban man's commuting nightmare, and "King Of Pain" turns personal misery into a catalog of grim omens. Copeland and Summers hold the whole thing taut when it could tip into melodrama, all clipped drums and shimmer. Three of the four members would never work together this way again, and you can hear the group already coming apart inside music this controlled.