Light in the Attic might just be the greatest label operating in the world right now; unconcerned with current bands and trends, its aim is to rummage through the dustier corners of bargain bins and studio vaults, and bring forgotten gems back into the public consciousness with informative sleevenotes and a bunch of bonus material, none of which detracts from the original artefacts. Last year, it gave Serge Gainsbourg’s peerless masterpiece Histoire de Melody Nelson its first American release, as well as reprinting the debut album from oft-sampled but never-reissued politico-soul man Lou Bond. Their latest trick, however, may be even more adventurous: bringing out a privately-pressed folk record by a late sixties hippie who simply vanished five years after the album’s release, and hoping that people will sit up and take notice – or at the very least, read a 500-word review on some website or other. Unlike the recent anthologies of artists like Emitt Rhodes and Dennis Wilson, Jim Sullivan’s U.F.O. has hardly been an in-demand commodity, but even a cursory listen makes you wonder will make you wonder why not.

Opener ‘Jerome’ begins with grand Romantic strings, before settling into a lolloping folk groove; Sullivan’s lyrics are typically cryptic for the era – “Where is where it’s at, Jerome?” asks the chorus – but his vocals themselves are far more down to earth, recalling Townes Van Zandt’s weary country twang or the morbid burr of Jackson C. Frank. ‘Roll Back the Time’, meanwhile, sounds like a Sweetheart of the Rodeo off-cut; a brisk country shuffle, it subverts the genre’s stereotypical imagery for something darker, as Sullivan’s former sweetheart sells him a ticket for “a trainload of anger that boils up to danger,” but as the track ends with some tick-tocking guitar harmonics, you can’t help but crack a smile. Meanwhile, the title track’s sense of wonder and longing for an escape – “looking at the sun dancin’ through the sky – did he come by U.F.O.?” – is emphasised by its almost lounge-like string arrangement, which sounds like Burt Bacharach rewriting the Carpenters’ ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’.

The album ends almost as quickly as it begins, with ten tracks clocking in at under half an hour, but – perhaps owing to its lost classic status – this brevity works to U.F.O.‘s advantage. Across the record, Sullivan is backed by members of legendary sessioners The Wrecking Crew, which may explain why the arrangements are so damn tight; and while Sullivan is hardly an original, his bricolage of then-contemporary sounds almost seems ahead of its time. ‘Highways’ matches Stax horns to Lee Hazelwood’s unique cosmic & western sound, while other tracks crib from the baroque pop of The Left Banke (another band begging to be back in print) or The Zombies and the odd bonkers Disney/Van Dyke Parks-esque string arrangement. More than anything, U.F.O. is the kind of record that should be mentioned in the same breath as Forever Changes or Scott 4 – intensely personal, yet socially-minded records, ignored in their day, which scratch the surface of a unique identity that their writers were – for one reason or another – sadly never to build on.