ALTHOUGH they would be too self-effacing to admit it, Uncle Tupelo subtly adjusted how we think about music. The success of alt.country — a genre that fuses indie-rock and country — is down to them. Uncle Tupelo launched the scene in 1990 with their debut album No Depression, now reissued with extra tracks and sleeve notes.

Nowadays alt.country often seems as conservative as the establishment music it purports to counteract. But when No Depression appeared, the trio from Belleville, Illinois, provided a vital punk alternative. Uncle Tupelo were not the first band to apply old traditions to new rock fashion — Dylan, Neil Young and REM, among others, had already done so — but Tupelo’s singer- songwriters Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar, pinpointed the maudlin strain that united roots music with the nascent grunge movement.

Much of No Depression, then, sounds like country songs attacked by hardcore legends Hüsker Dü. It is an album that country rebels should revisit, if only to remember how aggressive their music can be.

Still Feel Gone (1991) is another fine record, if not a seminal one: Farrar’s songs are calmer, while Tweedy’s — especially the opener Gun — foreshadow his poppier later work as the leader of Wilco.

The third of these impressive reissues, March 16-20, 1992, is superficially more orthodox, being an acoustic session recorded by REM’s Peter Buck, with plenty of folk standards among the Tweedy and Farrar originals. But the restless spirit, raw emotion and songs such as Black Eye ensure this is Uncle Tupelo’s career high.

(All Columbia/Legacy)

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