In a town like Seattle, recommending a country band is like inviting personal insult onto yourself. This is Seattle, the town that’s had more influence on hard rock than any other place in the 20th century. Get that country crud out of here; it doesn’t belong in the house Cobain built.

It’s a pretty music-snob opinion, but this is a pretty music-snob place. I am totally alright with whatever backlash is coming because I am about to recommend that everyone go out and pick up an album with southern guitar twang and four-on-the-floor drum lines.

Old 97’s isn’t a new band — they came out of Texas about the same time the grunge movement hit its stride in the United States in the early 1990s, and it is technically an alternative country, or “alt-country,” band. This album, Wreck Your Life … and Then Some: The Complete Bloodshot Recordings, is a reissue of their 1996 album Wreck Your Life with B-side recordings and alternate takes on a two-disc compilation.

A lot of people might have already heard the name but only a little bit of the music. Old 97’s got a sudden burst of popularity a few years back when a bunch of their songs were featured on shows like Scrubs and Veronica Mars, and they even had three songs in the movie The Break-Up.

Those songs, like the insane “Time Bomb” and the acoustic ballad “Adelaide,” are great and all, but there’s a certain degree of amazing experimentation in Wreck Your Life that later songs lose. It’s exchanged for a more polished sound, which isn’t a bad thing, but Old 97’s early sound was an experiment unto itself. Wreck Your Life is as if a bunch of kids raised on Texan-state-fair music and mere legends of heavy metal rock came as close as they could, and tried their hardest.

With fast guitars, heavy drum lines, crooning singers who mostly yell, Old 97’s pioneered the “alt-country” movement in the early 1990s. You can even hear it on the early B-side recordings of this collection: The music was an inexact science, and they were trotting along on brand new ground.

Of course, because the band is from Texas, these songs might still be a little too country to people predisposed to hate the genre. Modern singers, like Ryan Adams, try harder to be more “alt” than “country,” but Old 97’s embrace their roots, and the lines are pretty blurry. But I cannot stress enough that this should not turn anyone off. The songs are creative, the lyrics are inventive and tell real stories, and even though some of the songs sounds a little similar, they all have their own charm that keeps it fresh.

Wreck Your Life was an amazing album back in 1996 and works now, not only as a quaint retrospective on a band. It is also an excuse to jump headfirst into one of the better bands on the 1990s that didn’t come from Seattle and that still plays today. If you’re anything like me, you’ll wish you could jump back in time to the 2008 Bumbershoot to hear them play live or even back to 1996 to pick up Wreck Your Life when it dropped the first time.

The Complete Bloodshot Recordings, however, will have to do.

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Reach reporter Morgan Gard at weekender@dailyuw.com.