THE NAME GAME: Don’t hold your breath...

THE NAME GAME: Don’t hold your breath until you hear the name generating the biggest buzz at this year’s New Music Seminar, which begins in New York on Wednesday.

That’s because 1992’s big buzz band, a Scottish quartet that’s the favorite of no less than Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, has no name. It’s not some clever marketing gimmick. It’s just that the band can’t use its chosen name, at least not Stateside.

The band has been calling itself Captain America, but Marvel Comics, which has published the comic of the same name since 1941, says no go. So when the group--whose fuzzy, melodic sound recalls a harder-rocking version of its fellow Glasgow act Teenage Fanclub--makes its U.S. debut Tuesday in New York, it will be officially nameless. It had better come up with one soon, since Atlantic Records is planning to release its debut album in the fall.

Captain America frontman Eugene Kelly seems to have a penchant for using established monikers: His last group was called the Vaselines, though it managed to avoid the wrath of the petroleum jelly giant.

That band built a rabid cult following that included Nirvana--which has recorded the Vaseline song “Molly’s Lips”--and the folks at Seattle’s Sub Pop Records, which just issued a retrospective album titled “The Way of the Vaselines.” And earlier this year Captain America was forced to change its logo after a lawsuit was filed by the British department store chain C&A; for copyright infringement.