This week’s features include: カフカ (kafka), the peggies,
ヤなことそっとミュート (yanakoto sotto mute), なきごと (nakigoto)
and PELICAN FANCLUB

Hello, hello! It’s me, Leap, as always, and welcome back to the Japanese music rogue-like playlist builder you all know and love; the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft. We’re inching further along into the season with yet another batch of five tracks to possibly bring along with us on our little journey to reach this season’s Score to Beat.

If that sounds at all familiar, and you’ve been here before, then you probably already know the drill, feel free to head straight on down to this week’s drafting pool.

BUT, if this just so happens to be your first time here and you’re not entirely sure what this series is all about, please give the following primer a quick read to get yourself caught up to speed.

The Draft, inspired by player drafts in traditional sports and the draft formats of popular trading card games like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh, is a bi-weekly series where I tackle a simple question—

How good is Spotify at recommending songs to me ?

In this series, I put Spotify to the test by seeing how well it can recommend songs I’d enjoy based on the ones I already do. I do this by leveraging Spotify’s built-in suggestion feature for user-created playlists, using my ongoing Recommendation Roundup Playlist as the starting point, coupled with the final Draft playlists from the previous seasons.

This curated pool of over 800+ songs will serve as the basis for Spotify’s recommendations, fine-tuning its algorithm to better predict the songs it thinks I’ll enjoy.

I’ll let Spotify generate 5 (five) recommendations for me to check out every two weeks. Songs that make it onto a Draft playlist count as successful picks. Tracks that didn’t make the cut last season get a second chance if Spotify suggests them again. The ultimate goal? To see just how big this playlist can grow by the end of the year.

In Season 2, I added two mechanics to spice things up. The first was the Score to Beat, which sets the season’s target. Last season’s score was 101, so this year, Spotify needs to hit at least 102 successful picks to “win”.

The second change we implemented was the Wait List, a smaller, separate playlist (with a cap of three songs) which allows me to save tracks for later reevaluation.

Now, for this season, I’m shaking things up again by introducing a new mechanic: the Exempt List.

Think of this as a “hall of fame” of sorts: any bands or artists placed on the Exempt List will have their songs automatically ruled out for drafting this season (and possibly in future seasons as well). The idea for this came up while prepping for this year’s Draft. I noticed a pattern—Spotify kept recommending a lot of songs from the same handful of artists. While they’re all great, I felt like the series might start to feel repetitive if the same five or six names kept popping up every other week. The Exempt List, then, is my way of (ideally) ensuring we keep Spotify’s recommendations fresh and different each week.

Check out the Week 1 post for Season 3 to know the rationale behind the following artists being exempted from the Draft: Yorushika, ZUTOMAYO, YOASOBI, みゆな (miyuna), Hakubi, POP ART TOWN, whaledontsleep

Bands and artists can be removed from the Exempt List over time, though naturally, more names can—and likely will—be added as the season progresses, depending on how things shape up. Something to keep in mind.

We’re now in Week 8 of the Draft, and it feels like we’ve officially settled into the season. The big question now is, will Spotify start to slow down after its roaring start? Only one way to find out!

ーー

Give it to me!

Come on man, no need to bring YanaMute into this…

ーー

♥ ニンゲンフシン/ningen fushin by カフカ (kafka)

Kicking off this week’s Draft is Kafka; a band I honestly wasn’t too familiar with prior, which kind of caught me off guard considering how close their sound is to a lot of the current popular male-fronted acts out there (at least based on Ningen Fushin here). That was, of course, until I looked up when the song actually came out. In hindsight, it feels like a classic case of a band being just a little too ahead of their time. It’s a bit of a shame too, seeing as Kafka appears to have since stopped their musical activities altogether. Still, props to the Draft for surfacing these kinds of deep cuts for me. If nothing else, I’m glad we get to shine a light on their work in this way.

ーー

♥ グライダー/glider by the peggies

Next up is a band I am very familiar with; none other than the peggies, making an appearance here with Glider. Now, while I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a die-hard fan, the band still holds a special place in my heart as one of the very first I started following closely when I was getting into Japanese music. Glider, in fact, was one of the first tracks I ever heard from them. Now, setting aside my usual stance on album remixes (which, if you caught my Exchange/Rate review of Polkadot Stingray’s Zenchi Zennou, you might already know where I stand), I actually do have a soft spot for when a band decides to revisit one of their older songs later in their career. You get to see just how much they’ve grown since then, and that’s absolutely the case here.

ーー

♥ フィラメント/filament by ヤなことそっとミュート (yanakoto sotto mute)

Saying that I don’t miss Yanakoto Sotto Mute every now and then after their disbandment would honestly be putting it lightly. I don’t think it really hit me while I was actively listening to them, but looking back now, YanaMute might just be my favorite alt-idol group strictly from a musical standpoint. I remember saying as much when I first featured them here on the blog (hard to believe that was almost six years ago now) but if you didn’t know any better, just hearing one of their songs (like Filament here), you’d probably think they were a Japanese alt rock band with four vocalists. That exact feeling is something I absolutely loved about them, and it’s one I haven’t quite experienced again with any other group since.

ーー

♥ ひとり暮らし/hitorigurashi by なきごと (nakigoto)

Even though I came across Nakigoto pretty early on in my music listening journey, it actually took me a good while to fully appreciate their music the way I do now. Looking back, I do think it was a bit of a missed opportunity, not just in terms of immersing myself in their sound, but also in keeping up with their work over the years. That said, I’ve been doing what I can to make up for lost time, slowly but surely working my way through their discography. Hitorigurashi is one of the older tracks I’ve gone back to recently, and hearing it again here, I can’t help but feel a twinge of regret that I didn’t latch onto it sooner. But hey, better late than never, right?

ーー

＊Telepath Telepath by PELICAN FANCLUB

PELICAN FANCLUB is one of those bands that’s always kind of been in the periphery for me ever since I first started getting into Japanese music, but for one reason or another, I just never ended up checking out their stuff. Now, I do really like the instrumentation on Telepath Telepath. I’m especially into the crunch in the guitars during the opening stanza, which carries nicely throughout the track. That being said, there was something that didn’t quite click for me after a couple of listens, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at first. After sitting with it a bit more, I think I’ve figured out that it’s actually the reverb on Endo Anri’s vocals that was throwing me off a bit. I still think it’s a solid track overall, though, so I’m putting this one on the Wait List for now and we’ll see how I feel about it down the line.

ーー

This Week’s Total Likes:

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥＊

ーー

The Draft playlist on Spotify has been updated with this week’s Playlist Draft picks 😊
One (1) addition has been made to the Wait List.

Another 4 ♥ week in the bag. It really doesn’t get much better than this. The fact that it’s only taken Spotify three seasons to pretty much “figure me out” is, in hindsight, kinda wild. Granted, we’re only a quarter of the way through the year, and there’s still plenty of time for things to change once we hit the later weeks of the Draft. But honestly? It’s got me wondering how the Draft pools are gonna look in future seasons if this is what we’re getting now. I shudder at the thought, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t lowkey hyped at the idea of getting hit with more absolute dime recs like the ones we’ve been seeing this year thus far.

Let me know what you guys think down in the comments! And while you’re at it, drop which song or songs were your favorites from this week’s Draft. I’d love to hear your picks!

Happy Listening!