Clumsy teenage girl Yui does not know what to do with herself, nor what club she should join in high school. However, she eventually joins the music light club, thereby saving it from being abandoned due to a lack of participants. The other three girls who are members quickly form a rock band: Mio is the bassist, Ritsu is the drummer, Tsumugi plays the keyboard while Yui plays the guitar. The four girls are clumsy and doubt if they can make one good song. After they play they first song on high school stage, they get a fifth member, Azusa. Together, they become friends and play on a real stage.
"K-On!" is a fun depiction of a creation of a girl rock band, filled with a lot of humor and charm, yet it is presented through the lackadaisical 'slice-of-life' format, "Azumanga Daioh"-style: some episodes are really good, some are less interesting, and some have too much 'empty walk'. The consistent plus points are the two excellent characters of the clumsy, but lovable Yui and the rather more strict, charismatic Mio, who dominate the storyline, yet the other two band members, Tsumugi and Ritsu, are underdeveloped. The only thing we find out about Tsumugi is that she is rich, whereas Ritsu at times seems like a copy of Yui. It takes a while until "K-On" gets going after a long set-up, yet it rewards the viewers in excellent episode 6, which is a highlight of this anime: the movements, stylish gestures and charming attitudes of the four heroines come to full expression in this episode.
In one scene from the said episode, Ritsu wants to bolster the confidence of the girls for the upcoming first performance on stage, so she gleefully pretends she holds a microphone and is introducing the band members—she points to Tsumugi, says: "On keyboard, the graceful, cheerful, slightly ditzy princess, Kotobuki Tsumugi!", and Tsumugi takes it from there, raising her hands in the air, pretending to be playing keyboards—but then introduces Mio as "She's really bad with scary and painful stories, the dangerous queen of the Light Music Club...", and is interrupted when Mio hits Ritsu in the head, objecting to being called "dangerous". There is also a peculiarly, inexplicably aesthetically pleasant moment after Yui finishes her Sumo wrestler impression, and Ritsu, while sitting, taps the table with her pencil, then taps the floor with her foot and raises her arm to call the next people in line. One has to admit, their song, "Fluffy Fluffy Time", is melodic perfection, and their two performances on stage, in episode 6 and 12, really are fantastic, with the latter episode ending in an irresistible little moment when Yui raises her hands up in the air on stage, shouts "I love Keion!" and then the screen "shrinks" in the form of a heart sign. "K-On!" would have benefited from removing the superfluous episodes—the Christmas episode, the beach episode, the episode where Yui has to learn for her test—yet when the right kind of episodes show up, they can engage more than expected from such a light concept.
Grade:++
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