Hazelden breathes some life into 'Deadstock Rock'

You don’t just hear a lot of the 1990s in the music of L.A. quartet Hazelden, you hear a lot of singer Mary Jane Snow’s ambition. As one of the few kids from her self-described “white-trash Minnesota neighborhood” to attend college, she lived in Chicago, London and San Francisco before taking up songwriting in earnest, inspired by this decade’s rock revival, informed by heroes such as Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins and maybe even channeling a little “Celebrity Skin”-era Hole.

“It was about the time you started to hear the Strokes or the Vines on the radio,” she says. “I thought, ‘Oh, this is what I want to do.’”

She came to L.A. to do it, first playing open mike nights before falling in with bassist Joshua Wayne, guitarist Travis Garrecht and drummer Pete Vasquez, who on Hazelden’s debut EP “Deadstock Rock” help give Snow’s sometimes-foreboding anthems and given them a snarling, soaring edge — as evidenced on the track “To Live and Die in L.A.”

“I was nervous about putting [her first batch of songs] out, because I knew people would say, ‘Oh, this is Hole,’” Snow says. “But the guys have taken what I wrote and made it this new thing. ... This is an imposing town to play in, because there’s a million bands, but I think we have something unique. I’m not Jimi Hendrix, I’m not Janis Joplin, but I have confidence in my ability as a singer-songwriter.”

||| Live: Hazelden plays its EP release show on Friday at Bordello in downtown L.A. (scheduled to be the late set).

||| Download: "To Live and Die in L.A."