Singing an anthem of recovery

It’s Saturday in Las Vegas, but Alien Ant Farm’s Dryden Mitchell doesn’t feel much like gambling.

“It’s such a weird place,” he says. “I mean, all these people walking around hoping and praying to make it rich, all these false hopes and dreams ....”

Mitchell pauses then adds sadly, “I mean, you can smell the failure in the air.”

For the front man of the popular nu-metal act, the atmosphere in Vegas is stifling for an obvious reason: gambling’s inherent futility -- the pursuit of a cheap thrill that will fade all too fast. It’s not exactly the sort of somber assessment one might expect, however, from a 27-year-old rock star.

But Alien Ant Farm has a different perspective than most, a sober-eyed outlook spawned in part by a catastrophic bus accident last year, which killed the driver and left every member of the band badly injured. Mitchell sustained serious damage to his spinal cord.

“I’m so lucky just to be walking,” Mitchell says by telephone. “Not many people with my injury are able to walk. It doesn’t really hit you until you have a doctor looking at you saying that one in a thousand will walk away from this sort of injury.”

The fact is: Mitchell has not merely walked away. Barely a year after the accident, Alien Ant Farm is back in action, with a new album, “TruANT,” due in August, and a world tour ahead. On Saturday at the House of Blues Las Vegas, they played their first live show since the accident, an event for which they’ve spent months preparing.

Says Mitchell: “We’ve rehearsed, and I’m kind of listening to my body and waiting until it tells me not to do something. It’s good, though; I’m thankful for the opportunity to do it again.”

Mitchell seems as surprised as anyone else about the band’s quick recovery. “I’m amazed at how soon we overcame that whole situation,” he says. “The accident happened last May, and we got the final mix of our new CD on the same exact day one year later. It sounds cheesy, but I put it in my car and just got really teary-eyed thinking of everything we had gone through and everything that had happened. In a way it was sort of a soundtrack to the last year of our lives, and it made me happy and sad -- all at once.”

The band, consisting of Mitchell, guitarist Terry Corso, drummer Mike Cosgrove and bassist Tye Zamora, formed in Riverside in 1996 and got its first major break in summer 2001 with its amped-up version of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.” The high-powered cover won a slot on the “American Pie” soundtrack, backing one of the film’s more memorable scenes. The band’s tight, gritty sound was built upon exactly the kind of thick guitar thrust and big drum stop and start that is selling truckloads of records these days, a metal hybrid that manages to be both meaty and melodic.

If the new album is any indication, little has changed.

“A lot of my thought process is different now,” Mitchell says, “but it hasn’t affected the way we write music. A lot of people ask if we’re writing about the wreck, [but] we haven’t written at all about it.”

The accident occurred in May 2002, while the band was touring in support of the platinum-selling “ANThology.” Traveling from Luxembourg to a concert date in Lisbon, the band’s bus hit a truck in the early-morning hours on a highway in Spain.

“I don’t mind talking about it at all,” he says. “It was a life-changing experience, and in a way, I’m glad I went through it. I would never want to do it again, but looking back on it, I’m glad I got to experience all that pain and trauma because having survived that and coming out the other side OK and undefeated -- in a way, it was liberating.”

Mitchell seems to have taken this sense of liberation and added to it a sort of defiant objectivity. Later Saturday, he performed for a sold-out crowd in Las Vegas. Observers said he showed few ill effects from his injury.

He says his onstage persona will remain intact, in part, because he seems less concerned about vying for audience acceptance than merely trying to enjoy himself. “Basically, everything is good,” he says firmly, “I’m really in a good mood, and the things that were important to me are just not anymore -- my worries of, you know, ‘Is anyone going to show up tonight?’ or ‘Ticket sales are weak.’ I still get caught up in my little worry habits like any human being, but there’s now something in the back of my head that says, ‘Who cares?’ I mean, I want to be successful, and I want these things to work, but all those worries? I mean so what, I’m alive!”

Mitchell laughs softly.

“If people hate us? Oh, well, I’m still happy. And if they like us? I’m even more happy.”

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Alien Ant Farm

Where: Troubadour, 9081 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood.

When: Today, 7:30 p.m.

Tickets: Sold out.

Info: (310) 276-6168.