Name yourself after rehab — they said no, no, no …

That’s what Hazelden is finding. The L.A. rock quartet last week heard from a Minnesota-based law firm representing the prominent drug and alcohol treatment facility Hazelden. Would the band please change its name?

“I’m not sure what we’re going to do yet,” says front woman Mary Jane Snow, who says the band is named for Hedley Hazelden (1915-2001), a highly decorated World War II airman and test pilot [pictured above, with Hazelden]. Snow says her unsigned band can’t afford legal representation. The foursome just released its initial EP.

Seems to me a lot of bands are having trouble with their names recently; it’s obvious from the existence of RSI-inducing names like WFANFC and SSLYBY that all the good band names are taken. Afternoons — the local outfit helmed by members of Irving — might be looking for a new moniker because of the almost-forgotten Welsh band from a couple decades ago called the Afternoons. The L.A. band Muso recently renamed itslef Les Blanks because of trademark issues. And the Switch switched to Le Switch last year after finding that Switches were a dime a dozen.

We’ll see about Hazelden — for now, Snow says, her band is preparing for Sunday night’s big show at the House of Blues Anaheim. The quartet is opening for the New York Dolls.

Other highlights for the weekend, March 7-9

Tonight: Delta Spirit, picking up steam on the strength of its great late-’07 release “Ode to Sunshine,” headline the Troubadour, with the Virgins and Port O’Brien (nice album coming May 13) also on the bill. … Youngsters the Jakes and Billy Boy on Poison head up a big bill at the Roxy. … Division Day and the A-Sides are at Spaceland. … Cool Kiwis Die! Die! Die! play the Echo. … Why? and Yacht play at the Natural History Museum’s First Fridays shindig. … And Rademacher is squeezing into Pehrspace.

Saturday night: Liam Finn and the Heavenly States play at Spaceland, though Pela has had to drop off the bill because of a hand injury sustained by its guitarist. … The Dodos play the Silverlake Lounge (it’s a 4:30 p.m. early show). … Whispertown 2000 plays El Cid, while LoveLikeFire comes back into town for a show at Bordello that includes Light FM. … And there’s a cool Air Don’t Sleep show at Crash Mansion.

Sunday night: Travis Sullivan’s Bjorkestra is quite a spectacle — the band plays Safari Sam’s. … And Big Business is at Spaceland, with the Cops.

– Kevin Bronson

Talk about a roller-coast month.

The Little Ones gained a little one in January — and the Los Angeles quintet lost their record deals in the EMI corporate reorganization. “It was the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows,” says singer-guitarist Ed Reyes, who with wife Jenny became parents of a son, Nolan, on Jan. 31. Only a week earlier, the band was told it was being let go from its contracts with EMI imprints Heavenly (in the U.K) and Astralwerks (in the U.S.).

They’re regrouping. Later today, the band will announce a nationwide tour beginning in April with Syracuse, N.Y., sextet Ra Ra Riot — a jaunt that will coincide with the debut of a new, self-released EP titled “Terry Tales & Fallen Gates.”

“It’s full circle for us — we’re back to where we were in April 2006 with ‘Sing Song,’ ” Reyes says, referring to the debut EP that helped put the band’s upbeat pop on the map.

“Whenever you’re rejected by anything in life, it hurts. I’d be lying if I said we weren’t disappointed. But it’s a new day — like anything, you have to roll with the punches,” Reyes says. “The funny thing is, it never even felt to us like we were signed to a major [label], since both Heavenly and Astralwerks feel like indies.”

As part of the separation, the Little Ones were given back the masters for their completed album, “Morning Tide,” which originally was due to be released in April. The six songs on the new EP were recorded during the “Morning Tide” sessions but were not slated to be on the album. The band hopes to release it straight to iTunes, with physical copies available at shows.

||| Live: The Little Ones play a headlining date at the Troubadour on May 15.

||| Download: The intended first single from “Morning Tide,” “Ordinary Song,” as well as a remix of that song, at the band’s MySpace site.

– Kevin Bronson

Local miscellany: The cinematic quality to Dengue Fever’s sound makes it a natural for music videos. Here’s the latest from the band’s third album, “Venus on Earth” — a track titled “Seeing Hands”:

Elsewhere: That sold-out Hot Chip show that was postponed Feb. 4 (at the El Rey) has been rescheduled for April 28 — and it’s at the Mayan. No on-sale date has been announced for the additional tickets yet; tickets for the original show will be honored… Locally famous folkies and Jenny Lewis collaborators the Watson Twins are now aligned with Vanguard Records and have a debut album, “Fire Songs,” coming June 24. … Midnight Movies are back with a new EP, “Nights,” out digitally on Tuesday (check out “Should Have Known” on MySpace.

Highlights for tonight, March 6

Local dream-rock quintet Twilight Sleep celebrates the release of its new EP, “Race to the Bottom of the Sea,” with a show tonight at the Echo that also features Karin Tatoyan and Restaurant. … Brooklyn psych-rock quartet My Best Fiend, whose album of tuneful neuroses reminds you of stuff like Pink Floyd and Clinic, plays the first of a two-night stand in L.A. at the Viper Room. (The band is at the Echo on Friday.) Also teeing it up on the good Viper Room bill tonight: Gran Ronde, Reeve Carney and the Daylights. … Big goings-on at the Forum, where the Foo Fighters and Against Me! perform. … The Junior Boys are doing a DJ set at Spaceland, where Troy This is playing. … The Start kicks off a residency at Crash Mansion. … And local quartet the Hanks mark the release of their sophomore album, “Distance,” with a show at the Knitting Factory.

Liela Moss can talk the talk. Now her band, the Duke Spirit, has “The Step and the Walk,” and the sky might be the limit.

That single, off the British quintet’s new album, “Neptune,” capped a set that made you forget its occasional soft spots Wednesday night at the Echo, which was more crowded than NME’s thesaurus of platitudes. The shoulder-to-shoulder masses witnessed a band that’s about one tick short of a 12 o’clock high, as Moss and bandmates dealt lean, foreboding garage rock that harks back to the ’80s and ’90s Britpop heydays.

It all hinges on Moss, the singer who’s as much icy hot as hot-and-bothered. Her pipes have drawn comparison to Patti Smith and Nico and PJ Harvey; maybe there’s some more-gutteral Chrissie Hynde in there too, in the phrasing; and somebody in the throng even suggested Christina Amphlett of Divinyls, which … might not be too far off. Whatever. Moss delivers, even if you feel at times she’s trapped between offering herself directly to the crowd and maintaining her veneer of detached cool.

There’s a weather-beaten intelligence in Duke Spirit songs such as “Send a Little Love Token,” “Into the Fold” and “Cuts Across the Land” (the latter from its 2006 debut) that lesser bands might suffocate in histrionics. On Wednesday, nobody was gasping for air, except maybe the bartenders.

||| Live: The Duke Spirit returns to L.A. for a May 13 show at the Troubadour.

||| Stream: “Send a Little Love Token” [login required].

Photo by Kevin Bronson / LAT

– Kevin Bronson

The guys in Rooney lost more than a videographer when Brandon Schantz died in December. They lost a friend, whose sensibility and skills helped the L.A.-based quintet’s music shine on-screen.

Schantz, who died at age 27 from a rare form of lymphoma, will be saluted at the Roxy on Thursday night, when Rooney is joined by Brett Dennen, Lisa Donnelly and others for a benefit performance. Proceeds from the evening will go toward establishing the Brandon Schantz Memorial Endowment in Broadcast Journalism at the University of Texas.

“Brendan was an incredible friend and a very talented producer,” says Rooney’s manager, Kevin Dobski. “He also had a passion for live music.”

Schantz worked on the band’s videos for the songs “I Should Have Been After You” and “Are You Afraid,” as well as a behind-the-scenes promotional video. “Brandon and I shared office space. After he started doing some things for the band, the guys really liked the way they turned out and just kind of took to him,” Dobski says. “Even after he was diagnosed [in March 2007] and had surgery to remove a tumor [in October], he kept coming to work.”

The show begins at 7 p.m., and tickets are $25.

Photo by Autumn DeWilde

Highlights for Wednesday, March 5

The Duke Spirit, with a possible breakthrough album “Neptune” coming out in the U.S. on April 8, plays the Echo tonight. …  Howlin Rain, joined by the Moon Upstairs, performs at Spaceland. … The Autumns show off their new material at the Knitting Factory. … And a great bill at the Silverlake Lounge includes Hello Dragon, the Black Kites and the Hard to Get (celebrating the release of “This Is the New Business Plan”).

– Kevin Bronson

Earlimart’s announcement this morning on its MySpace website couldn’t have come as more of a surprise — the band has a new album finished and slated for release on July 1.

“It’s done, in the can and delivered,” front man Aaron Espinoza says of “Hymn & Her,” which will be released on Majordomo (an imprint of Shout! Factory) less than a year after the group’s first album for that imprint, August’s “Mentor Tormentor.” “We just want to be relentless, keep making stuff.”

“Mentor Tormentor” was more than two years in the making, but after touring behind that record, Espinoza got together with principal collaborator Ariana Murray. “I told her, ‘It’s just you and me, we’re going to get an engineer, reserve the studio and record 10 songs.’ … We didn’t want to do the whole wait-three-years-to-make-another-record thing,” he says.

The engineer was versatile multi-instrumentalist Andrew Lynch, who also plays keyboards and brass on the album, the band’s sixth. “He’s a talented dude,” Espinoza says. “We’re lucky to have him.”

No new songs posted yet, but I’ll let you know.

◊ ◊ ◊

Another local note: Silversun Pickups debuted their new, Joaquin Phoenix-directed video for “Little Lover’s So Polite” on MTV2. You can check it out here.

Photo of Earlimart’s Aaron Espinoza and Ariana Murray by Darrin Noble

– Kevin Bronson

Mezzanine Owls might have the most passive-aggressive sound around.

Front man Jack Burnside sings woundedly, tossing around snippets of imagery that could have come from a dog-eared journal, while trading twitchy, fuzzed-out guitar lines with Jonathan Zeitlin. Atop the churning rhythms laid out by bassist Dan Horne and drummer Pauline Mu, the results can be otherworldly. “It’s not like you make a conscious choice — you sing it the way it feels to you,” Burnside says. “Sometimes it becomes its own reality.”

That concept plays out in the song/metaphor “Snow Globe,” an insular three minutes of fury off the L.A. quartet’s new EP. The release, a vinyl 7-incher with a four-song digital download (on a new imprint, Jaxart, spun off the local Rock Insider blog), follows last year’s Owls debut, “Slingshot Echoes.” Both were recorded in Athens, Ga., with Andy LeMaster (the man behind Now It’s Overhead who also has collaborated with Bright Eyes and Azure Ray, among others). “We tried to be true to what we sound like live,” Burnside says.

The Owls’ local shows have proven enough of a hoot to win them fans among the shoegaze-pop followers of bands such as the Jesus and Mary Chain and Ride, as well as a fan or two closer to home. Burnside’s mother weighed in after a recent show: “She said we sounded apocalyptic,” he says. “How cool is that?”

||| Live: Mezzanine Owls play the Echo tonight with Eagle & Talon, Frankel and the Mae Shi.

||| Download: “Snow Globe.”

Photo by Timothy Norris

Other highlights for tonight, Feb. 28

The Walkmen and the Delta Spirit perform as part of the indie rock series at the Orange County Performing Artscenter’s Samueli Theatre. … Taken by Trees (ex-Concretes singer Victoria Bergsman) plays the Roxy. … British Sea Power winds up its two-night L.A. stand with a show at Spaceland. … The Vacation finishes up its residency at the Viper Room, with Run Run Run also playing .. And Tulsa, along with What Made Milwaukee Famous, plays the Silverlake Lounge.

– Kevin Bronson

Presidential candidate John Edwards wasn’t the only person moved by the story of Nataline Sarkisyan, the 17-year-old from Northridge who died in December of complications from leukemia and whose family’s battles with its insurance carrier became headline news. Two local musicians, producer-beatmaker-lyricist ailment (Tony Barkodarian) and rapper-lyricist eye2eye (Mike Chakrian), were touched too.

“We didn’t know Nataline personally, but I grew up in the same area and the whole story hit very close to home,” says Barkodarian, a Northridge native who now lives in Glendale. “The best catchphrase I heard was ‘murder by spreadsheet’ — that’s exactly what it was.”

After Sarkisyan’s death, Chakrian posted some lyrics on MySpace; upon seeing them, Barkodarian was inspired to write a beat. The pair got together and recorded a song, “Nataline,” and have made it available for download. Proceeds from the download ($1.99) go to the Sarkisyan family.

Learn more and download “Nataline” here.

Highlights for tonight, Feb. 20

Shane Alexander’s album release show goes off at the Troubadour. … Halestorm rocks the Viper Room. … And the Minor Canon and the Snow perform at Club NME at Spaceland.

– Kevin Bronson

A Cursive Memory are four kids from the San Pedro area who are having a boatload of fun. That’s the best way to describe “Changes,” their album that was released today on Vagrant. Reminds me of the O.C. band Hellogoodbye. The band’s album release show is tonight at Chain Reaction. Their video for “Everything” shows what happens when they mix it up in Tinseltown. Watch it here.

Highlights for Tuesday, Feb. 19

My immediate impression of “Alone Feels Like a Hotel Room,” new from the Kris Special, is that the L.A. trio has a tank full of Americana and the pedal to the metal. Anne Pointer’s vocals sound like a slightly less syrupy Jenny Lewis, and this record (which has producer Raymond Richards’ fingerprints on it) has some killer lap and pedal steel. Cool stuff. The record release show is tonight at the Echo (with the Harpeth Trace also playing) …. Everest leads a nice trio of local bands for Radio Free Silver Lake’s show at Boardner’s in Hollywood. … In the bigger rooms, the Hives and the Donnas rock the Wiltern; and Keren Ann, Dean & Britta and Sara Lov are at the El Rey.

– Kevin Bronson

[Be still your indie-rock hearts for a minute — this local-music installment groups three veterans of the L.A. scene with new albums, hosts of collaborators and upcoming shows:]

Jim Bianco

One of the originals on the Hotel Cafe scene, Jim Bianco comes as close as anybody I’ve heard to filling the long shadow of Randy Newman. On his new album, “Sing” (March 4, Hotel Cafe Records), Bianco’s nifty horn-, accordion- and piano-flavored arrangements and (occasionally) smilingly bawdy vignettes are as fit for smoky dives as swanky lounges. And the singer’s vaguely Waits-ian rasp is made for couplets like “To hell with the devil / I’m sellin’ my soul to you,” not to mention elastic enough to sell piano ballads (”Painkiller”) and groovy excursions (”If Your Mama Knew,” which sprinkles in “Rhapsody in Blue”). “Sing,” the Brooklyn native’s third album, is the first release on a new label spun off the Cahuenga Boulevard venue and includes cameos by Gary Jules and Cary Brothers.

||| Live: Bianco plays his album-release show at the Hotel Cafe on March 4, and a free in-store at Amoeba Music at 7 p.m. March 5. He also performs on the Hotel Cafe Tour (March 8 at the House of Blues Anaheim and April 12 at the Music Box @ Fonda).

||| Download: “I Got a Thing for You”. Check out the video for the song here.

Photo by Bethany Dwyer

Shane Alexander

The frontman of the longtime L.A. band Damone — before they sold the name to these people — Shane Alexander has stretched out incrementally on each of three solo albums, and his latest, “The Sky Below” (out today on BuddhaLand Records), muscles up considerably. Alexander, whose vocals might remind you of the Gin Blossoms’ Robin Wilson (or a couple other ’90s radio mainstays), remains an effective acoustic troubadour (especially on the title track), but with the help of backing players Chad Crawford, Charlie Paxson, Billy Mohler and Kim Bullard, he has created a catchy slice of meticulously produced mid-tempo rock.

||| Live: Alexander (co-billed with the bluesy Chris Pierce) plays the Troubadour on Wednesday.

||| Stream: “Amsterdam” here.

Photo: viakarlo@snapglamstudios.com

James Combs

James Combs get a lot of mileage out of choked notes, sprightly orchestration and a sprinkling of synths on his third album, “To Know You Is to Save You.” His filmy vocals are best when paired with collaborators Kelly De Martino and Erin Shawn Hawkins, but even alone they are ripe for his wry storytelling, amplified by a host of backing players that includes Nik Freitas (whose own album, “Sun Down,” is coming April 8). These are the tunes of vivid, waking dreams, and, every so often, realization.

||| Live: Combs, joined by Wisely and Buddy, plays El Cid on Friday.

||| Download: “Oh Me.”

– Kevin Bronson