This week’s features include: ましのみ (mashinomi), 八木海莉 (yagi kairi), EOW,
Sano Ibuki, and ヨルシカ (yorushika)

It’s June! How did that happen? It’s like that one meme where I blink and all of a sudden it’s the start of the new month already. Not only that though, as it’s also now the start of a another week of song picks here on the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft Season 2! 😀

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 ongoing Recommendation Roundup Playlist on Spotify.

Making use of Spotify’s built-in suggestion feature on user-created playlists, we will have it gather a total of 5 (five) songs for me to check out and listen to. In addition to my own playlist however, for this season we will ALSO be including the 100 Draft picks from the previous season into the mix, thus (in theory) refining Spotify’s recommendations even further while also ensuring that we don’t get any repeats (songs that weren’t picked from last season though will get another shot if they get recommended to me again). Songs that I like will get drafted on a *new* Draft playlist, where the goal is to see just how big it gets by the end of the year.

What else new in Season 2 of Draft, you might ask? Well, we will actually be introducing a couple more things that weren’t present in the previous season. The first, is what we will be calling the Score To Beat. Last time Spotify only needed to reach a 100 songs for it to get the W at the end of the year. We will treat that 100 as the *current* score to beat for the series, so for this season Spotify now needs to get 101 or higher before the end of the year in order for it to win.

To keep things fair however, seeing as Spotify juuuust barely reached its goal last year, we’ll be incorporating the Wait List; a separate playlist of songs (max 3) that I think I might reconsider drafting should it come down to it.

This is Week 11 of Drafts and Spotify has been on just an absolute tear for like four week straight now. Let’s see if this week’s gonna be any different.

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Run it!

Throwing in a track from Tousaku is so unfair.

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x フリーズドライplease/freeze dry please by ましのみ (mashinomi)

Kicking things off for us here on this week’s Draft is the song Freeze Dry Please by singer-songwriter/composer Mashinomi. Now, I have no trouble believing that she is in fact a very capable musician in her own right because I actually have listened to her before performing songs in a multitude of styles, from something more band-oriented like her work with WOLVEs GROOVY to her going bar for bar with Wez Atlas. While you can definitely hear some particularly neat song-writing in the verses here, I feel like she kinda lets the chorus of this track get away from her a little bit where it just doesn’t hit as cleanly as other parts of the song.

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♥ セレナーデ/serenade by 八木海莉 (yagi kairi)

Next up to the Draft is our Roundup Awards award winner for Best Prospect Of 2021, singer-songwriter Yagi Kairi, with her song Serenade. In the Awards post I mention how one of the things that truly made me believe she could definitely become a star one day was because she has so much opportunity to grow given how young both she and her career was. She had the talent, and she seemingly had a good grasp of who she is as a singer already too, so it was more just taking the time to come into her own. It’s been three years since and we’re definitely seeing a far improved Yagi Kairi now, with her seeming to have a better understanding of her vocal qualities than ever before.

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♥ 白花/shirohana by EOW

EOW was a band that we featured very early on in one of our Monthly Recommendation Roundups, well before Laco was discovered by Sawano Hiroyuki who in turn introduced her and her voice to a much larger audience than her band had ever did (we actually saw something similar happen with vocalist Mizuki who was also the frontwoman for a group prior to being involved in Sawano’s [nZk] project). I would’ve thought some of that newfound fame would carryover back to EOW but sadly that has yet to be the case, which does personally strike me as bizarre considering how I do think (and have thought ever since I first came across them) that the band has a sound that can be popular just going by Shirohana here.

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x Jewelry by Sano Ibuki

Sano Ibuki is an interesting call up here for the Draft when I think about Spotify’s reasoning as to why the algorithm thought to recommend Jewelry to me. Apart of course from me occasionally dabbling in J-Pop, the only thing that I can think of from a more tonal perspective (specifically the singing) is because I listen to Ohashi Chippoke somewhat regularly. Though I say that, a difference between this song and some of Ohashi Chippoke’s that I like is that this song just doesn’t have those big drops that the former have. That is to say, as I listen to Jewelry there are points where I feel like it’s building up to something, but it just peters out.

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♥ 昼鳶/hirutobi by ヨルシカ (yorushika)

I’m gonna sound really biased with this one, but I’ve always just loved how uncharacteristically aggressive Hirutobi is for a Yorushika track. Of course, n-buna and suis have since come out with songs like Matasaburo and 451 which some might argue as being more aggressive in comparison. That being said, I don’t think either can top the somewhat disdainful energy of the acoustic guitar strumming and the monotonous hammering of the snares give out. It always feels like I’m walking in the middle a bar fight whenever this song comes up (lol)

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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 🙂 Again, no new changes were made to the Wait List.

The 4 ♥ streak has now been broken, albeit just barely. 3 is still a decent number, especially here where every song counts. So long as Spotify is contributing to the overall total then this minor hiccup, if you could even call it that, is probably going to be largely negligible on the whole. However, by that same token, all it takes is just one song to make or break our Score To Beat of 100 this season.

What are your guys’ thoughts though? Let me know in the comments section down below!

Happy Listening!