This week’s features include: Hakubi, mol-74, Maica_n,
POLKADOT STINGRAY, and ロイ (-RöE-)

A third Draft week this month?! You guys are in luck! 😉

Quick little primer if you happen to be jumping in right now for the first time 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 my own 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)

Just like that, we’re about to wrap up the third quarter of this year with this one. Man… it feels like I just started this series!

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Alright, hit me:

lol How many POLKADOT STINGRAY songs am I gonna be recommended here

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x アカツキ/akatsuki by Hakubi

Hakubi’s a band that I do occasionally see in my recommendations and, judging by their sound it’s not hard to imagine how or why as they do occupy the same music space as a lot of other bands I listen to. That being said Akatsuki doesn’t sound like the kind of speed and even range for Hakubi, at least in my opinion. I feel like they do better work with something a bit faster and with a lower pitch.

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♥ エイプリル/april by mol-74

While I haven’t listened to any of mol-74’s songs before, at least to my knowledge, the PV for April on YouTube does occasionally make its way into my feed and I’d just… refused to listen despite the 9.4 million view count telling I probably should. Regardless, I’m here having listened to it now and the instrumental here is actually kicker. The drums in particular feel very Math-y which I thought was neat.

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x Missing angel (rock ver.) by Maica_n

My initial thought, after seeing this song be qualified as a “rock version”, was to check and see what other versions of this there anyway. I found out that Missing angel also came in an “acoustic version” and it’s like… infinitely better. Like, I think Maica_n might be one of those types of singers whose voice plays better with more ‘unplugged’ type of instrumentation as opposed to rock arrangements like this one.

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♥ おやすみ/oyasumi by POLKADOT STINGRAY

Hyper Klaxon was one of the last of POLKADOT STINGRAY’s releases that I listened to close to when it came out before I started falling behind on their newer stuff and I do specifically remember noting how, the further along they have gotten as a band, the more emphasis they’ve started to give to Shizuku’s vocals as with Oyasumi here. Of course, it’s very much warranted.

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x 癒えないキスをして*/ienai kiss wo shite by ロイ (RöE)

I do find it funny that, looking back, my initial exposure to RöE was from her cover/rearrangement of Soutaiseiriron’s China Advice of all things, which all but blew up in popularity in large part due to JP TikTok. Ienai Kiss wo Shite is actually the first original song of hers that I got to listen to and… yeah, I’m not too crazy about her voice. I dunno, maybe a different track of hers would do it for me.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

x ♥ x ♥ x

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This week’s picks have now been added to the Draft playlist on Spotify!

Just when I thought Spotify was nailing it week after week with the picks, we get a… not so good week. Granted it’s been a while since we’ve had a similar showing in terms of ♥’s given out so it’s not too too bad.

The playlist is at 77/100 so, if anything, it’s a passing grade now 😛