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You want alternative? As in a true alternative to the musical pabulum served up by major labels? Not as in the watered down, quirked up crapola of corporate-sanctioned millennial messiahs like Beck, but as in something truly different, with stylistic verve AND emotional grit? Then I’ve got the album for you.

Bukowski, by a crazed Welsh duo called Rheinallt H. Rowlands, is easily the most impressive album I’ve heard so far this year. Its ambition, in an age all too lacking in it, is on a grand scale: to fuse a variety of influences - especially 60s flavoured Bacharachian pop, Pet Sounds Beach Boys,

Scott Walker, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass (!) and Ennio Morricone film scores - with an operatic sense of drama via Joy Division (whose New Dawn Fades they once covered) and a neo-classical sound. Rheinallt H. Rowlands not only succeed, but do so in a way which represents (finally) the next step from the usual sneeringly “ironic” sensibility of postmodern pastiche: Bukowski is fun stuff, for sure, but it is genuinely emotional, just like the work of the writer for whom it is named.

And just what are a couple of Welshmen doing writing a paean to the late Los Angeles bard of the lowlife anyway? Just goes to show that Charles Bukowski’s influence has been - and still is - greater in Europe, a fact that he acknowledged many times (Rheinallt H. Rowlands is a fictitious persona created by the band along the lines of Bukowski’s alter ego Henry Chinaski; the liner notes here feature a Rheinallt tale by England’s Dreaming scribe Jon Savage). What’s so endearing about Bukowski is that even when RhHR sing in Welsh (their label Ankst, fast becoming the 4AD of the 90s, is the spearhead of a nationalist Welsh movement, and was once the home of

Super Furry Animals), the spirit of the music prevails in a way which makes their emotions totally comprehensible, even when the language isn’t.

Diwrnod Braf, the lead-off track, has a Phil Spectorish feel, replete with church bell, swirling strings and horns by Dewi Evans and an impassioned vocal from Owain “Oz” Wright, whose voice sounds like a dramatic cross between Nick Cave and the Scott Walker of Tilt. At first it seems that they might be joking, but you soon realize it’s for real as the song proceeds and you’re drawn into the infectiously wacky and wonderful world of Rheinallt H. Rowlands. The Morriconian Snow follows and this time an English-language lyric depicts the doings between the song’s protagonist (Bukowski?) and Death himself, this a la Scott Walker’s The Seventh Seal, itself a treatment of the Ingmar Bergman movie of the same name. Snow is a faithful musical treatment of themes Bukowski explored throughout his entire career.

Carchar Meddwl Meddal is one of the album’s finest moments, a neo-classical piece evoking “fear and loathing in a drunken haze and a room with no windows”, as the liner notes explicate. Again, one can vividly imagine the classical music-loving “Buk” listening to something like this on the radio with great enjoyment while sitting in yet another fleabag dive with a bottle of cheap wine, hammering out his no-holds-barred tales of gutter life. Merch O Gaerdydd borrows a very familiar Tijuana Brass horn line to great effect, capturing the more lighthearted, epiphanic side of Bukowski: those brief moments when life is good, and you know you’ve got to savour it while it lasts, because really, what else is there? Go ahead, just try to feel depressed while this is playing, I dare you.

Loved, another English language lyric, invokes another of Bukowski’s recurring themes: his dealings with the opposite sex. “All women wanted was civility/they never saw the man behind my role/they never guessed at my fragility/they wanted coffee not my tortured soul/I wasn’t loved ...” croons a melancholy Wright as a distinctly Jacques Brel-sounding orchestration by Evans envelops him. The epic 10 minute title track, “written partly before, partly after” Bukowski’s death, passes through a variety of musical moods in the manner of his novels, opening with breezy horn-driven pop, downshifting into an evocative, downright gorgeous middle section featuring organ and delicate strings, then finishing with a jazzy, bopping outro. A finer, more respectful tribute to the spirit of an often misunderstood writer whose works ultimately celebrated life despite its many letdowns and travails is hard to imagine.

I could gush about the brilliance of Bukowski for hours, tell you about the update of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds-era melodic magnificence on Isabella, or the moving, stately arrangement of the ballad Nos Da Cariad, but you get the picture. Bukowski is that rare 90s pop collision between talent, ambition and passion. Need I say more?

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