Music

Ghost of the old scene’: Caleb Lindskoog brings The Silver State back to the Silver State

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Caleb Lindskoog recorded new album Outside (above) in Las Vegas.
Andy Wang

Caleb Lindskoog, frontman of The Silver State, always wanted Las Vegas to have more of an indie scene. But looking back on it, going to Las Vegas Academy in the 1990s wasn’t so bad.

“I was there the last year they still had an open campus, so my friends and I were free to roam around the Fremont area on breaks, which was pretty amazing in retrospect,” he says. “It felt electric and wild, like anything could happen. We used to go to this place called Cafe Enigma and hang out, see whatever show was up in the little gallery space they had there, listen to whatever experimental/free jazz/noise/something-or-other album they had on, see whatever acoustic act was playing on the back porch of the adjacent photo studio. That was a pretty special place. We also spent lots of time at Cafe Espresso Roma. Another ghost of the old scene.”

Lindskoog also remembers long-forgotten spots around town like the Lab. He still regrets missing Neutral Milk Hotel’s show in that converted ranch house. Balcony Lights or Benway Bop were other venues where “great bands would roll through and play tiny shows. It felt like they were all part of this advanced race of aliens or something, and I would think, ‘I want to be one of you. Take me with you!’”

Lindskoog moved to Brooklyn in 2005. I knew him as my favorite Brooklyn bartender, but he isn’t a guy with a bowtie or his own homemade bitters. He just made mean margaritas at a Tex-Mex dive. He was always friendly but had the edge of a man who seemed a bit unsettled, especially when we talked about how weird it was to live in Vegas.

The Silver State's Outside

But The Silver State’s new album, Outside, recorded in an abandoned old Vegas dental lab where Lindskoog and guitarist Taylor Milne once worked, is a shimmery reminder that you can be happily unsettled.

“So much of the record is about the specificity of time and place in our lives, and here we were in this gutted commercial space. It was dead to that world. But for this, it was perfect,” Lindskoog says.

The result reminds me of Creeper Lagoon, Wilco and Grandaddy before that band got overwhelmed by technology. It’s a retro road-trip album, with a single about the Colorado River and a song about pulling off the highway to watch a meteor shower at an A&P.

“One person told me it reminded them of ’70s AM radio rock,” Lindskoog says. “I don’t know if that was meant as a compliment, but I took it as one!”

The Silver State Opening for Leopold and His Fiction, with Dusty Sunshine. August 27, 9 p.m., $10. Bunkhouse, 702-854-1414.

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