This week’s features include: Cent Chihiro Chittiii, LELLE, 青山幸子 (aoyama sachiko),
笹川真生 (sasagawa mao), 鷲尾伶菜 (washio reina), and Ran   

Hello, hello! And welcome back to the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft Season 2! I would like to think that this deep into the season, you already know what you’re tuning into. HOWEVER, if you just happen to have stumbled across this series not really knowing what it’s about, here’s a quick primer on what the Draft is all about:

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 23 of Draft and, as you might expect with such a number, the end is nigh for this season. To those keeping count, you don’t need me to tell you how close this contest is going to be come the final tally.

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Run it up!

Hello, my old friend…..

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x 夜王子と月の姫/youji to tsuki no hime by Cent Chihiro Chittiii

In trying to find out more about WACK product Cent Chihiro Chittiii’s Youji to Tsuki no Hime, I would come to learn about two things about it. One is that the song is actually part of a double A side single alongside fellow BiSH standout AiNA THE END. The other is that the it’s a cover of a song by the band GOING STEADY. The song is… ambitiously long which isn’t necessarily something that I tend to mind, but when you couple it with how droney her rendition sounds (especially compared to the original) you do start to feel that length midway through. I know she’s since gone on to do great things after further pursuing her work as a solo artist, but this one is respectfully a pass for me.

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x 青とゲート/ao to gate by LELLE

I… honestly feel a bit bad that I’ve shafted LELLE so much throughout two seasons now of the Draft. I mean, I always make it a point to sing praises of the band’s instrumentation so I know there’s some good music to be heard in their songs, but as I’ve expressed numerous times in the past, Sakurai Kentarou’s vocals just isn’t for me. Spotify has been adamant at getting me to listen to the band who, to their credit, did get a pick from me on their third attempt at one. However, I won’t be as lenient with Ao to Gate here. There’s spots where I feel like I’m about to like it, but the singing just takes me away from the moment way too much. Man I sound such a hater.

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♥ スロウナイト/slow night by 青山幸子 (aoyama sachiko)

It boggles my mind that I never got around to featuring Slow Night at any point on the Roundup despite becoming such a fan of Aoyama Sachiko’s solo career post-Negoto, but here we are. Highlight in general is such a banger album with back to back hitters from the first track to the last, and this song is clearly a testament to that. Fans of Negoto in particular (speaking as one myself) will find Slow Night particularly enjoyable because of how much Aoyama is able to carry Negoto’s musicality over to it. Negoto’s spirit without a doubt lives on in Aoyama’s solo work.

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♥ エンカウント/encount feat. 笹川真生 (sasagawa mao) by 鷲尾伶菜 (washio reina)

What I love the most about Encount, which I think is actually a testament to Sasagawa Mao’s involvement in the track more than anything else, is that it doesn’t really sound like a song you would expect from a former J-Pop girl group, and instead lends itself to something more yakousei-like (something to note is that Washio released this track as a ‘faceless’ artist under the name “rei”). Not that there’s some sort of stereotype for artists like Washio Reina, formerly of E-girls fame, but one might agree that at the very least it’s a far cry from the kind of songs that she would sing as part of the aforementioned group. Huge credit again to Sasagawa Mao for their work on this track in that regard. Very much a fan of the vocal layering implored here.

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♥ 夜逃げ/yonige by Ran

I believed Ran at one point in time to be one of the most promising young prospects in Japanese music. I mean, she still most certainly is, don’t get me wrong. However she has also been notably inactive for the better part of last year barring a handful of wayward singles. She was a little more present this year with slew of songs featuring other guest artists (notably one with the great Ueda Marie), however still few and far between. I say as much because I do find a lot of promise in her music, as you’ll hear in one of her earlier songs here in yonige.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

x x ♥ ♥ ♥

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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.

A 3 ♥ week is, admittedly, not something you want to be seeing this late into the season with only a couple of Draft weeks left before our final tally. Not gonna lie… I’m a little worried for everyone’s favorite music streaming service here.

Let me know what you guys think about how this season of Draft at this juncture.

Happy Listening!