Uncle Tupelo’s ‘Anodyne’ Reaches Beyond Cult Status : Pop music: The band’s new album is on Warner-distributed Sire Records. But that doesn’t mean the group has lost its independent voice.

Uncle Tupelo’s new album, “Anodyne,” comes as close to honoring the late Gram Parsons’ vision of a rock-country hybrid as anything released in the last couple of years. Steeped in the spirit of Hank Williams and Merle Haggard, principal singer-songwriters Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy build a sustained tone of soulful yearning.

Even when the string-band arrangements are upbeat and lively, a lonely, elusive quality permeates the music. The album moves at a deliberate pace that answers only to the demands of the songs, not to some sense of what listeners might want.

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The same kind of musical blend and lyrical sensibility has been earning Uncle Tupelo--which headlines the Whisky tonight--great reviews since 1990, but for the first time they have a real shot at recognition beyond critics and cult. After three albums on the independent Rockville label, Uncle Tupelo is now with the Warner Bros.-distributed Sire Records.

“I guess idealism and current realities don’t always mix,” says Jay Farrar, who heads the trio with longtime partner Jeff Tweedy (the third member is Nashville-based drummer Ken Coomer). “At Rockville it just got to a point where we weren’t sure they were actually gonna be able to put up money to record more albums. Creating albums is pretty much our lifeblood, so . . .

“It helped out the recording of ‘Anodyne’ quite a bit. We got the studio of our choice, and maybe had an extra week to work on it. . . . We’re still traveling around in a van, but now we’re actually driving two vans. We’re gonna have to get some CB’s, I think.”

Farrar says that so far the Sire deal has posed no threat to the group’s independence--something often compromised by a major-label affiliation, and a quality that Uncle Tupelo has always guarded zealously. That’s one reason that Farrar and Tweedy still live in Belleville, Ill., the small, blue-collar town where they grew up.

Uncle Tupelo’s evolution has been somewhat circular, at least in Farrar’s case. Growing up, he was exposed to his mother’s folk records--Woody Guthrie, the Weavers, et al--and to his dad’s renditions of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams songs.

But when he started playing in bands as a teen-ager, he tackled a different kind of roots--garage-rock, the R&B-based;, psychedelic proto-punk churned out in the ‘60s by such groups as the Chocolate Watchband, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators and the Yardbirds. Then when he and Tweedy started writing their own songs, they found themselves back at square one--classic country.

“We had explored the loud dynamic for quite some time, so you just try to move on,” he says. “I guess initially you have a slight aversion to whatever your parents are listening to, just from a rebellion standpoint. But it’s always been there peripherally, and eventually you kind of come back to it.”