K-ON! - Episode 5

With their training camp complete and the band's abilities very slowly coming together, it's time for the light music club to officially make their application to play at the school festival. One problem - Thanks to somebody never completing the form, they still aren't actually recognised as a club.


While having the required number of members is no problem, the girls are left bereft of the teacher they need on-hand in an advisory capacity for the club - The obvious choice is the school music teacher Yamanaka Sawako, but she's already busy with other club activities and so no amount of persuasion will convince her to take on the duties of looking after the light music club. Of course, when persuasion fails there's always blackmail, and in Sawako's case there's a perfect opening to gently coax her into doing her bit for the girls.

So, with Sawako in place and the light music club now officially in existence, what of the music itself? There's obviously room for improvement, but the obvious glaring omission pointed out by Sawako is the lack of lyrics, or indeed a singer. Mio soon knocks together some lyrics in her own typical style, but who is to sing them? In fact, never mind that, why does Mugi keep spacing out around Sawako?

By this point five episodes in, there's probably no need to discuss this series in terms of how cute or entertaining it is, as that's pretty much a given, and certainly this episode exhibits both of those traits without ever slipping into the Mio-tastic previous instalment. As well as being fun to watch though, this episode also proves to be pretty amusing in places, reminding us that it has more strings to its proverbial guitar than simply checking the boxes in the database of "moe" (apologies, I've been reading Hiroki Azuma's Otaku: Japan's Database Animals this week, and this particular show is almost a poster boy for the theories it posits regarding 21st century otaku).