Richard Hawley - Richard Hawley/Late Night Final/Lowedges [Reissues]

Having made a start in Sheffield band Treebound Story, Hawley found a modest degree of fame during the 90’s in the ranks of Britpop-era rockers Longpigs and, after the band's implosion, as a tour guitarist with Pulp. All the while, Hawley kept adding to a catalogue of original material that had virtually nothing in common with his day jobs, or anything else that had seen the light of day since the mid-60's, really: if you're looking for a model example of music that exists in its own universe, totally unlinked to any styles or scenes that were hitting the headlines at the time of its creation, these albums would provide an ideal specimen.

It’s a particularly inviting universe, too. Listening to Hawley's reissued earliest albums now, it's difficult to understand why - as the story has it - Hawley needed considerable amounts of convincing from Pulp pair Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackay before recording any of this stuff. Near-permanently drenched in a melancholy downpour, steeped in hugely unfashionable amounts of romantic sincerity and parked in the section of the musical car parks where the wheels belonging to, say, Johnny Cash, Jimmy Webb, early Scott Walker, Tim Hardin and Lee Hazelwood take their rest, the whole softly glowing package immersed in Hawley's warm croon and enough twang for half a dozen Duane Eddy records, this music is admittedly totally out of step with anything else that was around at the time of its original release; if these albums were movies, they would undoubtedly be in black and white, the mise-en-scene featuring prominent roles for silhouettes in windows, curls of cigarette smoke and city lights reflected in puddles. Considering the brief shelf-life of various bandwagon-jumpers, that's surely a good thing. It's strange to think that albums as unashamedly classic -and classy - in their points of reference as Richard Hawley and Late Night Final have never been available on vinyl until now: it almost seems wrong to listen to music with such vintage aspirations in any other format. That said, this isn't another pointless bit of retro-obsessed mimicry: Hawley’s inspirations may be aged, but these tunes are still tied to the here and now, timeless as opposed to inextricably hitched to a certain bygone era.

If you thought Hawley suddenly got good around 2005's breakthrough, Mercury-nominated Coles Corner, here’s the evidence to the contrary: that signature sound and the tunes were pretty much present and correct from the beginning, both just needed a bit of fine-tuning before the full splendor of Hawley's vision could be exposed to an ever-growing audience. If these records mark the years when Hawley resided in the dreaded file labelled ‘critically acclaimed’, it's certainly not the material’s fault. Perhaps predictably, 2001's debut – originally released as a mini-album but expanded to 12 tracks by the inclusion of various non-album B-sides - is the most muted of the trio, with comedy song titles ("Cheap Spanish Whine") perhaps belying their author’s low expectations. That said, when the album hits the spot – check out the slow-motion opener "Coming Home" - the results are superlative.

By Late Night Final, released later in 2001, the grip is firmer, the feelings are deeper and the tunes larger. The melodically rich likes of the swooning opener "Something Is", the dramatic "Long Black Train" and the gorgeous lost classic "Baby You're My Light" find Hawley pitched confidently halfway between the precise craftsmanship of classic Brill Building songwriting of the pre-Beatles era and the reverb-happy rawness of vintage rockabilly. As with, say, the balladry of Tom Waits, the sentiments so openly on display – one half romantic despair, the other head over heels in love, with spots of what could be loosely termed as social realism chucked in along the way, every minute of it coated in thick lashings of melancholy - could easily collapse into mawkishness, but Hawley’s total dedication and convincing performances keep such cynical thoughts at bay. Impressively, the nocturnal crawl of "Can You Hear the Rain, Love" is even better, with the central guitar motif working up a heartbreaking estimation of the sound that falling teardrops might make.

By 2003's Lowedges, many of Hawley's signature tricks - including naming albums after Sheffield locales - were honed and perfected. Musically, the album isn't so much a departure from its predecessor as a gradual evolution; a careful honing of a template that was pretty much already in place. The musical ambition and spirit of exploration that has helped Hawley expand and tweak a signature sound that was threatening to become a self-parody on the less resonant parts of 2007's Lady's Bridge with the grand, gloom-fuelled Truelove's Gutter (2009) and the psychedelic hues of the considerably more confrontational Standing at the Sky's Edge (2012) is easy to spot amidst, say, the muscular thud of the dramatic "Run for Me" and, at the opposite end of the decibel-counter, the stark, thoroughly stunning "It’s Over Love", the lonesome ruminations of which could most likely break a heart from a great distance. As well as being a disarmingly beautiful performance, the closer "The Nights Belong to Us" is of some sort of evolutionary interest. The tune is huge, the strings swoon, but Hawley pulls back, almost as if he's embarrassed to unleash to songs full, epically dramatic potential. By Coles Corner, he had correctly calculated that it’s worth going all out towards blazing widescreen in search of the listener’s heartstrings. The results, as they say, are history.

• All three records are out now through Sentanta Records and available on vinyl, CD and digital download.