Years in the making, Spider-Man, the movie, promised to be an awesome event months before editing on the project was even complete. Once the flick opened, it quickly broke box office records and loudly lived up to the foreshadowed hype. The accompanying soundtrack promised to be a relevant companion piece to the movie. It's that, and much more.

Chad Kroeger of the hard-rock outfit NickelBack delivers the monstrous metal ballad, "Hero," featuring Saliva's Josey Scott. Kroeger squeezes power-chords from his guitar with little effort as he and Scott trade vocal lines and harmonies in crushed-glass fashion. Gloom-and-doom rocker, Jerry Cantrell, of the now defunct Alice In Chains, sticks close to his melodically-spooky ways with "She Was My Girl," pumping up the testosterone. Fans of late Alice In Chains singer, Layne Staley, will note how close, vocally, Cantrell is to Staley.

Canadian band Sum 41 clock in with "What We're All About (The Original Version)." A cross between Green Day and Anthrax, Sum 41 are heavy on comedy and talent, and light on themselves. The lads don't disappoint, alternating between choppy rap-metal and skull-crushing speed metal, the band even enlists death-metal stalwart Kerry King (Slayer) for a blistering guitar solo.

The new breed of metal is well represented here with powerhouse acts like Black Lab ("Learn To Crawl"), Default ("Blind"), Theory Of A Dead Man ("Invisible Man") and Greenwheel ("Shelter"). Flavor of the week, middle-finger waving bad boys, The Strokes, kick it out with "When It Started," a monotone romp that recalls both the Rolling Stones circa 1970 and early Nirvana.

Some folks may ask what a song titled "Invisible Man" is doing on a soundtrack dedicated to Spider-Man, but those are the people who haven't seen the movie yet. The fact that Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker is invisible to Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane Watson for most of the movie, makes the song a perfect fit.

Composer Danny Elfman chips in with two instrumentals: "Main Titles" and "Farewell," the former an engrossing musical score that brings total recall of the movie's best battle sequences. Oddly enough, the pieces somehow fit in sandwiched between a bunch of sweaty rock tunes.

Aerosmith, the rock and roll band that refuses to die, offer an animated, and fist-pounding read of "The Theme From Spider Man" to close out the disc. The original Saturday morning cartoon version of the track opens the album. Rumor has it that punk legends The Ramones version of the song was originally considered for the soundtrack, which would have really added to the cartoon element of Spider-Man. Aerosmith do a bang-up job, slipping out of their cheese-metal skin to deliver the song with a wallop.

Web-heads everywhere will want to pick up a copy of the Spider-Man Soundtrack simply to feed their Spidey addiction. They'll be pleasantly surprised at what they find when they do.

By Todd Sterling