This week’s features include: DADARAY, Cö shu Nie, Citrus in the rain,
ミシェルメルモ (michel melmo), Minekomine

I know it’s April Fool’s and all… but we don’t mess around here on the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft, now hitting its seventh Week!

To those unaware of what this is ー

The Draft, inspired by player drafts in traditional sports and draft formats from popular trading card games like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh, is a bi-weekly series where we try to answer the question;

How good is Spotify at recommending songs to me ?

In this series I will test Spotify’s ability to recommend to me songs that I would like based on songs that I already do like in the form of the Recommendation Roundup Playlist on Spotify. Specifically this involves making use of Spotify’s built-in suggestion feature on user-created playlists to gather a total of 5 (five) songs for me to check out and listen to. Songs that I like will get “drafted” and go on a separate Draft playlist, where the goal is to see just how big said playlist will get by the end of the year.

If it makes it past a hundred, Spotify gets the W over me, and if not, we get to declare the Recommendation Roundup playlist as the vastly superior playlist (XD)

We ended the first quarter of the year with a decent amount of drafted songs already. Let’s see what Q2 has in store for us!

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Starting us off we have:

A bunch of cool sounding names ain’t it? (XD) Pretty sure they all *sound* cool too 😛

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♥ 恋してばかり/koishite bakari by DADARAY

This is actually the second song off the Gala album from DADARAY (the first one having been recommended to us back in Week 5) and so far I’m finding out that it’s actually a pretty dope album (XD) Something I noticed both Heart no Aizu and now Koishite Bakari is that REIS’ vocals are much more forward than in previous songs of theirs, at least in my ears. Very welcome change if ever.

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♥ iB by Cö shu Nie

Cö shu Nie has far and away made themselves the premier name for unnerving Alternative Rock over the years in large part due to the textbook haunting overtures ever-present in their songs (that for the most part we can probably attribute to the classically-trained Nakamura Miku). Which is conversely what makes the otherwise Pop-y iB here all the more fascinating of a listen.

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x ミッドナイトデート/midnight date by Citrus in the rain

Not a name that’s familiar to me and looking at their monthly listeners it doesn’t appear as though I’m alone in that regard. Citrus in the rain describe themselves as a “City Pop Unit” and while I can kinda see the instrumentation being that, the vocals sort of just veer a little bit brighter side making for a bit of disconnect (or at the very least I’ve been associating City Pop with warmer vocals)

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♥ ちょいとまち/choitomachi by ミシェルメルモ (michel melmo)

If you happen to follow me on Twitter, you might’ve noticed that every so often I put out a Tweet about songs that I’ve been putting on “indefinite loop” for some reason or another. I bring this up because Michel Melmo’s Choitomachi would have been without a doubt something I’d have Tweeted about had I come across it in the wild. Alas, I did not, but in exchange they get a spot on the Draft.

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♥ くわの実/kuwa no mi by Minekomine

Speaking of Twitter, full disclosure, I actually randomly happen to be mutuals with Minekomine (lol). That being said, do trust that even if that wasn’t the case, I would still draft Kuwa no mi. The song has like a early to mid 2000’s Western Rock sway to it that I can’t put a finger on that’s kinda rad. Something to note with regard to that is she lists Gorillaz as one of her favorite music acts.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

♥ ♥ x ♥ ♥

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This week’s picks have now been added to the Draft playlist 😀

Good haul this week, I can’t even front. Spotify’s back on the upswing again with its recommendations from the looks of it after having had some bumpy weeks in the previous month. April’s actually gonna end up having three Drafts because of how the dates happened to line up so if I’m not careful (lol) Spotify can start pulling away to get to its 100-song goal by the end of the year.

Do you think it’ll make it to a hundred now that we’re a quarter of a way there? Let me know down in the comments! Likewise, let me know what you guys think of this week’s Draft!

Happy Listening!