This week’s features include: Yuinishio, Hakubi,
サヨナラの最終回 (sayonara no saishuukai), Rhythmic Toy World, and yourness

This is it! This is now the final week of this season of the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft! In a journey spanning all twelve months (twenty-six weeks in total to be more specific) We have now made it here to our final stop as we now determine if Spotify’s recommendations really are up to snuff. Before anything else though, if this is actually your first time here and you just happened upon this post 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 26 as I mentioned and… wow, it doesn’t even feel like I’ve done that many of these and yet here we are.

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Aight, for one final time this year; show me what you got:

Looks like we got some timely ringers here.

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♥ 帰路/kiro by Yuinishio

Starting things off strong here is Kiro by Yuinishio, who’s an artist that I do wish I get to feature more on the Roundups than I currently do, for reasons that should be quickly apparent as you listen to this song here. This would be one of her older songs (as I’m reminded that she’s actually been doing her thing for a decent while now) but she was already a vibe even back then.

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x 道化師にはなれない/doukeshi ni wa narenai by Hakubi

This is now, like, the third song off of Hakubi’s era album that we’ve listened to over the course of this season of the Draft and… I had a hard time determining whether or not I actually liked this one. I did ultimately come to the conclusion that I think I personally might just be a little bit over this whole anison type of J Rock song progression that they got going on here for this track.

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x あなたが読む物語/anata ga yomu monogatari
by サヨナラの最終回 (sayonara no saishuukai)

Before I go over the specific reason why I turned Anata ga Yomu Monogatari down, let me first say that I actually like a lot of the ideas that Sayonara no Saishuukai (awesome name btw) had here, particularly the intro (and really the instrumentation as a whole) I was very much fond of. It’s just that, unfortunately, and this is gonna sound funny but….. this song is way too long for what it needed to be.

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♥ HAME by Rhythmic Toy World

Not gonna lie, I actually thought Rhythmic Toy World would be more popular, just going by how familiar-sounding their name was. Maybe it’s a generational thing and I just missed their peak, but I digress. HAME, at the very least, does indeed sounds like a song by a band that’s been around the block. It’s a solidly written track with not a lot of bad things you can say about if at all.

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♥ 日々、月を見る/hibi, tsuki  wo miru by yourness

Despite them being one of the more well-known bands that I’ve now talked about here on the blog, I actually haven’t heard much from yourness apart specifically from used for the anime Yesterday wo Utatte, so I didn’t know how much their sound gravitated towards emphatic guitar riffs into an emotional chorus a la Atarayo and if you know me you know I love me some Atarayo.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

♥ x x ♥ ♥

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Now, normally, this is where I would link the updated Draft playlist on Spotify but for fun, we will be doing the final tally on the 2023 Roundup Awards on December 31, where we will crown the season winner. See you there 😉