I can say with all honesty that I’ve never reviewed a record quite like this one. Jim Sullivan’s U.F.O. is an album of its time, unmistakeably, and in the best possible way. Sullivan evokes an image of the freewheelin’ 60s that has been styled after the fact by the likes of Easy Rider (in which Sullivan had a cameo), The Doors’ ‘Riders On The Storm’ and the interminable cool of David Axelrod. It’s a dusty, itinerant, and oddly transcendent record that embraces the musical arrangements typical of the era, while upending the archetype with sneaky melodic bends and strange turns of phrase. Backed by The Wrecking Crew (the legendary backing band on so many albums of that era), U.F.O. was recorded in 1969 with the assistance of private label Monnie Records, and released in the U.S. in very limited numbers. Sullivan disappeared while on a road-trip outside of Santa Rosa in 1975 and his disappearance remains a mystery.

The album is a restless union of country, rock and acid-pop bound with an air of the stifling desert heat, characteristic of the American West Coast. There are glimpses of Sullivan’s contemporaries Willis Alan Ramsey in ‘Roll Back the Time’, Nick Drake in ‘Jerome’, and even the later (and dirtier) recordings of Hank Williams in ‘Sandman’. It may be the doing of the Wrecking Crew (who played with everyone from Nancy Sinatra to Leonard Cohen), or perhaps it is the warmth and fuzz of the old analogue recording, but U.F.O. is dissimilar to any contemporary albums I’ve heard.

That’s not to say it sounds dated. There is a sense of both nostalgia and agelessness in the whimsical arrangements and effortlessly driving rhythms of U.F.O., while Sullivan’s voice hovers casually above it all. It feels generous for Seattle’s Light in the Attic Records to have re-released this album so long after Sullivan’s disappearance, not because it is an icon or a masterpiece, but because he was talented and a good reminder of all the other talents left in immortality’s wake.

Review Score: 8/10