Uncle Tupelo

Uncle Tupelo started out as a punk band that didn't discriminate against acoustic instruments. The Belle-ville, IL, band was founded by boyhood friends Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy (who would later go on to greater fame in Son Volt and Wilco, respectively). From the start, they blended rock dynamics with string-band textures, scorching electric guitars with whining pedal steels, and Appalachian-style ballads with blasts of feedback. These guys would've been booted out of any self-respecting bluegrass festival for their lack of chops, but the songs were unusually mature. "No Depression," the title track of the debut album, is an old Carter Family tune, also adopted by the group's following as an umbrella term for an emerging neo-country movement. But the four Uncle Tupelo albums are broader in scope than that narrow definition might suggest. No Depression at times sounds more like the Minutemen than it does a neo-country band, with its herky-jerky arrangements and harsh guitar spasms. Farrar sings of the "same town blues" in the opening "Graveyard Shift," and the album details Rust Belt life with first-person authenticity: dead-end jobs, the solace found at the bottom of a whiskey bottle, "the sound of people chasin' money and money gettin' away."

Still Feel Gone is more of the same; in one song the trio of twentysomething Midwesterners tries to sound like 70-year-olds pickin' and grinnin' 'round the still, in the next it's paying homage to the Minutemen's D. Boon. March 16–20, 1992 is an all-acoustic detour, produced by R.E.M.'s Peter Buck. Nearly half the album is traditional country and folk ballads, including the Louvin Brothers' "Atomic Power." Many in the band's hard-core following consider this Tupelo's crowning achievement, but the earnestness of the first-person coal-miner and moonshiner narratives is overbearing at times.

By the time of Anodyne, Tweedy and Farrar were collaborators only for publishing purposes, taking their songs down separate roads as a prelude to their breakup the following year. Farrar delivers plaintive ballads, Tweedy the twangy pop. But the unsung star is a new addition to the band, multi-instrumentalist Max Johnston, whose battery of stringed instruments gives the potentially schizophrenic album a cohe-sion and consistency that make it Tupelo's finest effort. (GREG KOT)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide