Mike Mettler

Good is good. It’s a simple adage, but one that’s especially true when it comes to music. Genre and predetermined preferences should be secondary if you’re truly interested in having your ears entertained, challenged, and enriched.

Good is good. It's a simple adage, but one that's especially true when it comes to music. Genre and predetermined preferences should be secondary if you're truly interested in having your ears entertained, challenged, and enriched.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross won the Oscar for Best Original Score for The Social Network, and it's a modern and adventurous film score if ever I've heard one. It's haunting, of-the-moment, and immersive - and, best of all for us S+V types, it's available in surround sound. Go here to get yours.

Some things you know right away in your rock & roll bones. When I first met Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins in 1991, we bonded over the contents of a suitcase he carried with him wherever he went: an ever-growing mountain of live Jimi Hendrix cassettes (some authorized, some not). As the Pumpkins’ trippily punishing debut album, Gish, had just begun melting the ears of the alt-rock cognoscenti, Corgan was already cocksure of where he was going in the world.