This week’s features include: エゾシカグルメクラブ (ezoshika gourmet club),
ユアネス (yourness), アイラブミー (I LUV ME),
ずっと真夜中でいいのに。(zutto mayonaka de ii no ni; “ZUTOMAYO”),
and 八木海莉 (yagi kairi) 

It’s Draft week babyyyy~ Yes, indeed it’s that time again for yet another installment of the one and only Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft! If you’re fan of the series and have been following it already, you know already to skip this next portion of the post but for those of you who are new to the blog and are not quite sure what this is, underneath is a quick little primer on what the Draft is all about 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 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 now Week 15 of Draft and our second week into the latter half of the season. Will this be our sough after first 5 ♥ week this season?

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We’ll find out soon enough if these songs will be the ones to do it.

I got a good feeling…

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♥ 弾ける炭酸/hajikeru tansan by エゾシカグルメクラブ (ezoshika gourmet club)

Ezoshika Gourmet Club is a band whose songs very often get recommended to me by Spotify for some reason or another. Though admittedly I’ve barely scratched the surface of their discography, for what it’s worth I do think they’re fairly solid all around based on what I’d heard from them, but nothing yet really has grabbed my attention… until now. I think what really rounds out Hajikeru Tansan for me was the inclusion of guest vocalist Sex Frappuccino (…yes, that’s her chose name) of DoorKnobRock whose voice I thought plays really well with EGC’s Ikezawa Suguru here. Shame it’s not a proper feature, but despite that I also thought the bass and the drums were very tight on this track as well. Well done.

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♥ 紫苑/shion by ユアネス (yourness)

Meanwhile, yourness is a band that (for me at least) continues to impress. I dunno what it is exactly, maybe I’m just not giving them enough credit or I’m too fixated on pigeon-holing the band as only sounding a certain type of way, but in the same manner as the week when we featured Shounen Shoujo wo Yametekara I am again pleasantly surprised hearing what I had initially thought was going to be a straightforward J-Rock ballad. Instead yourness puts a modern modern spin to it employing some particularly nifty guitar riffs.

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♥ 社会の歯車/shakai no haguruma by アイラブミー (I LUV ME)

I LUV ME went 3 for 3 in Season 1 of Draft which, compared to this series’ standards, is fair bit impressive (especially when you consider the performance other bands or artists that regularly show up here like Hakubi for example who end up being more of a mixed bag the more their songs got featured on here). Unfortunately though I LUV ME did swing and miss with their first appearance on Season 2, but was able to come back with what I still think to be their favorite song by them shortly thereafter. They’re up to the plate for a third time this year with Shakai no Haguruma and they knock it out of the park yet again. Love the rhythm and the overall melody they went for with this one.

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♥ 彷徨い酔い温度/samayoi yoi ondo
by ずっと真夜中でいいのに。(zutto mayonaka de ii no ni; “ZUTOMAYO”)

I’m gonna sound like the biggest ZUTOMAYO hipster after I go and say what I’m about to say, but yeah no, as someone who was running their first two EPs to the ground prior to the release of Hiso Hiso Banashi, I can confidently say that older/earlier ZUTOMAYO songs just hit different. Not to say that ACAね and the gang got worse over time (if anything one can definitely argue that they’re better on a technical level even), but at a certain point it felt like the group just got too tunneled on having a layered and complex sound being their main selling point, with their songs over time just becoming less and less straightforward like Samayoi Yoi Ondo here which they did used to more often.

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♥ ダダリラ/dadarira by 八木海莉 (yagi kairi)

Last time I talked about Yaki Kairi I mentioned how the time since her debut has seen her grow tremendously as an artist, of which she’s now reaping the benefits of, specifically with her continued involvement with anison thanks in large part to her affiliation with Sony Music Artists. Suffice for it to say, people are finally starting to take note and I’m happy for her for it. That being said, I always believed Yagi Kairi’s unique vocal timbre would eventually get her there through some other means, like maybe even going the route of pairing up with a Vocaloid producer, which is a style she can totally pull off as evidenced by her making light work of Puruuri‘s track for Dadarira here.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

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The Draft playlist on Spotify has been updated with this week’s Draft picks 😊
There were no new additions made to the Wait List.

And there it is. The season’s first 5 ♥ week! … And it only took 6+ months to get to one (XD) Of course, the hope is that this is just going to be the first of many as we now start to wade into the latter half of Season 2. Regardless, this was a much needed outcome for Spotify as it shoots up from 49 to 54 overall picks. We went from barely half our Score To Beat for the season (101) to well over half. A sign of things to come perhaps?

What do you guys think? Let me know down in the comments below!

Happy Listening!