This week’s features include: 三浦透子 (miura touko), Ezoshika Gourmet Club,
a子 (A-ko), POP ART TOWN, and Maica_n

Hellooo! It’s time to welcome you guys back once again to the one and only Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft. It feels like it was just yesterday when I first started out this series here on the blog yet here we are now in the waning weeks of this season of Drafts and I’m excited to see how our picks pan out at the end of the year.

I’m getting ahead of myself though. If this is actually your first time here and you’re not exactly sure what you just walked into, as a quick primer 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)

This is Week 24 of Drafts and as I said previously we are nearing the end with December already less than a week away by the time this comes out, and from the looks of it, it might just come down to these last couple of weeks.

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Here’s this week’s spread:

I mainly know her as an actress now because of Drive My Car, but I genuinely forgot for a second that Miura Touko sang (I even featured her in the Roundup once, LOL)

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x FISHANDCHIPS by 三浦透子 (miura touko)

… This is a weird-sounding song ngl (XD) I mean, it starts weird at the very least and it progressively picks up where towards the end it actually kinda slaps, but those opening minutes are pretty harsh (at least for me). The funny thing about FISHANDCHIPS for me personally though too is if you speed it up yo like 1.5-1.65x speed it deadaxx sounds like a ZUTOMAYO song.

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♥ 明日の月にさまよえば/ashita no tsuki ni samayoeba by Ezoshika Gourmet Club

While I don’t have the best track record when it comes to showcasing male vocal talent here on the blog, you should be relieved to know that it doesn’t take much for me to like a male-fronted band. Epecially if they come in with a sound similar to ones that I like, particularly that of suneohair and AKFG, which is what we have here in Ezoshika Gourmet Club’s Ashita no Tsuki ni Samayoeba.

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Diver by a子 (A-ko) [originally by NICO Touches the Walls]

I forgot all about this song when I first got to listen to Ako’s rendition of it and didn’t realized it was a cover of a NICO Touches the Walls song of all things until much later. I love how this was remixed and if you’ve been following the Roundup this past year you’d know that I’ve had a growing fascination for Ako’s work so all the more reason for me to like this. We need more of these 2010s revival tracks.

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♥ あそびたりない/asobitarinai by POP ART TOWN

PAT being one of if not he Draft’s most featured bands will never not be amusing to me. Like, obviously I listen to them a lot, but I got into them only recently with the release of their last full album so Spotify’s trying to retroactively ‘complete’ my library by giving me songs from their older releases. Asobitarinai is from their 2020 album Sensation and we have, like, three songs from it already Drafted (XD)

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♥ Flow by Maica_n

Here’s an odd instance of a song that I already “liked” before by way of Maica_n’s Flow. We got to feature her not too long ago in a previous Draft week and in there I noted how I much preferred hearing her in something more ‘unplugged’. While not entirely that, Flow still has an acoustic guitar presence, and I do think that’s enough for Maica_n’s singing to just flourish like I always thought it could.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

x ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

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

That’s 4 ♥’s this week which, to those keeping score, now makes 94 total. Spotify is now just 6 songs away from making it happen. Of course, I know what songs are left to be drafted and I’ll say this to you guys now without giving too much away, the next two Draft weeks are going to be… tricky.

How did you guys like this week’s Draft though? Lemme know in the comments!

Happy Listening!