Rock Music

When the Killers' singer Brandon Flowers crossed the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood before a recent taping of "Jimmy Kimmel Live," he displayed the first sign that the band was beginning anew: He lacked a mustache. Around the time of the Killers' 2006 second album, "Sam's Town," Flowers grew a thick push broom worthy of that record's grandiloquent Americana. Drummer Ronnie Vannucci one-upped him with a fearsome Fu Manchu, and bassist Mark Stoermer let his blond scruff run wild.

Much of the best music to come from Los Angeles in 2008 was about obscuring, misdirecting and pressing forward in the dark. The five standout acts (and one bonus selection) below nod to local traditions -- punk ballistics, free jazz, feral psych and heat-wave hip-hop -- but are more interested in breaking them down and rebuilding them in difficult new ways. Expect to hear more from these groundbreaking Southern California artists in 2009. If your band writes songs under two minutes long, employs a stockroom worth of noisemaking gadgets and enjoys the tasty vegan snacks of Crops and Rawbers, you probably had a good 2008.

IN the news release for "Infinity on High," the imminent fourth release from emo-pop band Fall Out Boy, the band's bass player-mouthpiece Pete Wentz offers fans this directive: "The ideal presentation for this album would be for someone to buy it, take it home and listen to it in the dark." Pete, what are you thinking? You've described the classic album-listening experience: a college freshman, a pair of headphones and Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon." But that was 1973, this is now.

MUSE singer-guitarist Matthew Bellamy can still remember the British trio's first Los Angeles gig. "It was at the Viper Room. There were only about 20 people there," he recalls. "It must have been when I was 19 or 20 in 1999. It was one of our first gigs abroad." That show was set up to showcase the band for American suitors from Maverick and Columbia Records, but the conditions were far from ideal. "It was the first time I had really flown that far from home," Bellamy says.

I was a student with my first camera, living above Tower Records on the Sunset Strip, in the mid-1960s. My father, Felix Landau, was an art dealer whose gallery was by then a cornerstone of the L.A. art scene. Pop art was just emerging, and I was sensing a divide between the more classical European-influenced fine art on display in my father's gallery and the exuberant, vibrant art of American culture in all its bawdy and commercial badness.

"A desert," South African author Nadine Gordimer wrote, "is a place without expectation." She clearly wasn't a Rage Against the Machine fan. The band comes to the furnace heat of Indio this weekend with three days of rock and dance music and a show-closing reunion that has brought giddy fans from around the world: Rage is back and playing its first gig since 2000. Guitarist Tom Morello just smiled this week when asked how the band sounds in rehearsals. "Ferocious."

Before he was gunned down onstage on Dec. 8, 2004, by a crazed "fan" in Ohio, the late Pantera / Damageplan guitarist "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott was one of the most ferocious ax-wielders in rock music. His grinding, bottom-heavy riffs helped propel Pantera from the underground to chart-topping metal gods, a feat the band reached with 1994's "Far Beyond Death." Says fellow guitarist Dave Navarro: "I've always been a fan of Pantera, particularly of his playing.

A rare Beatles documentary, a reunion of performers from the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival and salutes to D.A. Pennebaker and Stax Records are among the highlights of this year's Mods & Rockers Film Festival. The American Cinematheque's eighth annual festival of rock-related movies will run from July 13 to Aug. 1 at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood and the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. The festival will open with "What's Happening!

L.A. DJ Cut Chemist, who has grooved with such diverse partners as hip-hopping Jurassic 5 and Latin funksters Ozomatli, will mix up another of his sonically potent potions Sunday night at the Hollywood Bowl. The recording artist also known as Lucas McFadden (his latest release is "The Audience's Listening") will co-headline the KCRW World Music Festival event with DJ Shadow.

It's not the actual content of "My December," Kelly Clarkson's just-released third album, that currently makes it unlistenable. I'm not saying that it's a bad album -- it's a solid, heartfelt, occasionally beautiful exercise in mainstream modern rock, and most reviews are confirming that. "My December" is unlistenable in the sense that nobody can really hear it. Sometimes this happens to a work of art: The din around it from a controversy renders the thing itself mute.