This week’s features include: パスピエ (PASSEPIED), Ran, edda
塩入冬湖 (shioiri fuyuko), and 長靴をはいた猫 (nagagutsu wo haita neko).

Hello! Welcome back, once more, to the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft. We are now in Week 23 and, as some of you might already be aware, we are now in the waning weeks of the series before we crown our ultimate winner. But before all that though; if this is actually your first time here and aren’t quite sure what’s going on 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)

Given how tight the margins have ended up being for the Draft, this last couple of weeks are going to be quite the deciding factor to say the least.

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Which songs will Spotify try to close out the game with?

Not gonna lie, bit of a low impact week looks like, but I could be wrong.

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♥ まだら/madara by パスピエ (PASSEPIED)

I’m convinced now that PASSEPIED is just one of those bands that I came across while I was too young, both in the real sense of the word as well as in terms of my exposure to different sounds. Like, I used to so averse to vocalist Natsuki’s singing style but now I’m not even minding it as much if at all and I get to just appreciate the band’s musicality like with Madara here. Good stuff.

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♥ 行方/yukue by Ran

This now makes Ran’s second appearance here on the Draft and, given the otherwise ‘quiet’ year the promising Pop/Rock artist has had, I’m at least glad I get to talk about her music in some capacity by revisiting her older work. Here’s hoping we see more activity from her in the year that follows, but in the meantime we’ll continue to jam out to her music with tracks like Yukue here.

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x イマジナリーフレンド/imaginary friend by edda

Speaking of second appearances, this is actually edda’s second stab at the Drafts after her first left much to be desired, at least for me personally. While Imaginary Friend here, I think, is a better song all around than Ame no Machi, it still falls a bit flat for me. Like, the vocal performance was a bit more on point here, but the instrumentation just felt too one note in my opinion.

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x SCRIPT by 塩入冬湖 (shioiri fuyuko)

To the uninformed, Shioiri Fuyuko is the guitarist/vocalist of FINLANDS, whom also made an appearance here on the Draft not too long ago. While I had quite a many good things to say about the cult favorite duo, Shioiri’s solo project wasn’t doing it for me here. I felt like there was a distinct mismatch in energy with her singing compared to the overall track which kinda took away from the listening experience.

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♥ 天満月/amamitsutsuki by 長靴をはいた猫 (nagagutsu wo haita neko)

Nagagutsu wo Haita Neko will forever be (in my book at least) one of the many unfortunate ‘What Ifs’ of Japanese Rock bands that could’ve done some great work if things lined up a bit better for them. Amamitsutsuki is another one of their songs where I hear it and I’m like, it’s clean, it’s imaginative, and they do some pretty neat things here so what gives? Truly a shame.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

♥ ♥ x x ♥

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The Draft playlist on Spotify has now been updated with this week’s picks.

Kind of an… average-ish week for the Draft this week as it goes 3 out of 5 ♥’s. That being said however, if you’ve been keeping score, this now adds to a total of 90 drafted songs; just ten away from reaching a hundred! Tbh when I first conceptualized this series I wasn’t really doing any sort of projection analysis as to whether or not it was even plausible with the bi-weekly setup that I decided to have this on.

Sure enough it seems to be just the right amount of time. Three more weeks left, which translates to fifteen songs remaining in the pool. It’s soooo close (XD).

What did you guys think of this week’s Draft? Lemme know down in the comments!

Happy Listening!