A fun, breezy romp through album covers and decade-by-decade trends and minutiae-turned-mountains in music (rock, R&B, pop, etc.), covering the 1950s through 1990s. Yes, someone definitely needs to revisit this motif and add the "aughts" (I hate that word) and 2010s to this mix. Generally, Ochs' essays on each decade in pop culture and societal mores are brief and basic, almost perfunctory. Unless you need Pop Music 101, there's not much to glean from them, and I almost wish he'd foregone them entirely (though inclusively printed in English, German and French) for the sake of adding four more pages of album art per decade.

Most sobering here is how so many albums, and exceptional ones, by Black artists in the 1950s featured generic white persons/pairs in the cover art, so that it would plainly sell better. Most amusing and compelling are the obvious visual acknowledgments of certain album art influencing later releases, or that "spawned" album art serving as callback to an earlier record. Further, it's subtly hilarious how some albums that came out within one to three years of each other had far-too-similar covers for it to be coincidence.

I learned about a few vintage acts I'd never heard of, such as The Four Aces/Coins/Lovers/Lads/Preps. I smiled at instantly nostalgic looks at everyone from The Ronettes to Diana Ross, Grace Jones to Billy Joel, 10CC to U2. And there were many visual reminders within about why an Instagram account like @ObscurestVinyl can exist at all; some of these covers are the guffaw-inducing gifts that give and give some more. In the end, a fun little jam of a coffee-table book.