by DAVE SURRATT

Whether they remember it or not, those who hit Neon Reverb's Sept. 12 Beauty Bar showcase last year saw a fleeting promise of things to come as Halloween Town fretted their hour upon the stage. Burly guitarist and frontman Ryan Pardey, beyond buzzed and feeling chatty between songs, spun a quick and poignant yarn about two men he'd heard talking on the bus that week, one recently widowed. "I guess I just miss my wife," was the unassailably vulnerable conclusion Pardey overheard, took home and put to paper in the form of, artlessly enough, "I Guess I Just Miss My Wife" -- a brand-new mid-tempo jangler the wobbly band kicked into as soon as that tale was done.

If it wasn't a hands-in-the-air party moment, which it wasn't (off-guard faces everywhere on the patio), it was certainly a real one, direct, unironic and redemptive all at the same time. Against a backdrop of other Vegas bands whose stage presences last fall tended more toward aloof cynicism and unearned mystery, Halloween Town, for all its intemperance that night, suddenly stuck out like a bruised-but-healing thumb. A year later, the band still does, in a way that's a little more healed yet no less distinctive.

"Yeah, I don't know of any other way to do it," Pardey now tells me with a laugh over the phone from a state away, where he's at the moment rewriting a song he penned a few months back, just before leaving Las Vegas for San Diego. "These are very personal songs and I want people to feel them personally. If people connect to me up there, they'll connect to the music ... I want them to grasp onto the songs if they want to, and I gotta be candid and honest if I want it to work."

Spoken like a man who, fortunately, doesn't quite understand how cool he's being.

Even though conceptually elusive Halloween Town (or, Ryan Pardey and the Whoever's-Now-Helping-Him-Record-and-Perform-His-Compositions Band) may have looked a lot that night like yet another extremely loose-knit Vegas act ready to disintegrate in the next strong breeze, it wasn't. A creatively stagnant period did come and go between then and now. But like the best stagnant periods, it turns out precious inspiration was slow-baking the whole time.

Native Las Vegan Pardey says hard, nocturnal living and a congealed disenchantment with Vegas, combined with the geographical dissolution of his professional gambler family over the last year -- dad to Washington, sister to Alaska, brother to Texas and Ryan himself to California -- have been a big deal. Sure enough, the past year's trials have made it into his most recent work, emerging in songs like "Sports Bettor's Replies," with its folk Americana, Silver Jews-esque couplet, "The chosen son on another relapse / As the house of cards collapsed." That one's on vinyl now, a new self-titled 7-inch that Halloween Town releases officially Sept. 19 at the Aruba Showroom.

"I'm more excited about the Aruba show than anything else, 'cause I'm really playing to my people there," he says. Given that the "anything else" involves opening for The Killers at a somewhat grander-scaled Mandalay Bay gig earlier that evening, that's saying something. A longtime friend, muse and mascot to those Vegas chosen sons, "Captain" Pardey's Halloween Town was added to the bill (as well as to The Killers' Sept. 18 show at Cox Arena in San Diego) by Brandon Flowers after a planned appearance during The Joint's inaugural weekend earlier this year failed to come together. Now the band, composed of Pardey and assorted members of San Diego's Louis XIV, Transfer and The Shys, spends a busy weekend finding out what justice a nine-member ensemble (including horn section) can do to his self-described "confessional, soul-coughing" compositions.

Since leaving Vegas in June, Pardey says his head has cleared. It seems drinking less and regular swims in the bracing SoCal Pacific have made him a better man, or at least a happier one.

"Leaving Las Vegas has changed my perspective," he says. "Kind of lightened things up a bit. I'm not so locked up in my mind all the time. And the bars close here ... I'm not out 'til 8 or 9 in the morning, then trying to sleep away the hot summer day. That's Vegas. It'll always be home, but I wasn't being good to myself and I needed to get out of there in the worst way."

Coming to that realization is what the new record's all about, says Pardey. As a result, the gloomy nostalgia about otherwise bright-sounding Halloween Town will stay for now. Maybe for the rest of the band's life. Or maybe not.

"It's just too dark," he laughs, referring to the song he was rewriting when I called. "It's like, 'Boy, I'm not feeling so dark anymore, so I'm gonna try this one again.' It happens sometimes. A lot of these songs are still kind of dark and introspective, but I really don't want it to be my handle. I don't want to be another Elliott Smith."

Whew.