In this case I am reviewing one which art is kind of remarkable, with decent musical compositions, but appalling melodrama and cardboard characters: Sound! Euphonium.
Art & Animation:
I am, like everyone, a biased person, and I have to confess that I'm not a fan of how Kyoani confront their creations: they clearly are almost unbeatable in how they animate every detail and how fluid can look, only comparable with cinematographic works of Ghibli, CoMix Wave, or any film with high display of production values like Redline or Sword of the Stranger.
Of course, they lack of creativity in some aspects like character design in order to make them look as cute as possible ends up falling into the generic department, losing against other formidable pieces like Dennou Coil, Cowboy Bebop and FLCL. And don't make me start on how some animes with budget limits prove that your animation can have high standards like Haibane Renmei, Rakugo, Trust and Betrayal, Evangelion or Berserk '97.
Music:
In a series about music, someone may expect masterpieces that can give classical musicians a run for their money or at least if the staff are using non original soundtrack, to use it properly like Nodame Cantabile so you can mentally relate the music with the anime. And even though it's not bad music per se, it's unfortunate how average are such compositions and how wasted it feels at the end of the day (you can separate it almost completely from the anime and enjoy it more on your own!). I can forgive this if we weren't talking about a slice of life where the cast is in a school band. Fortunately, sound effects are extremely polished but that can be expected from Kyoani.
Story:
So far I haven't spoken about what is this all about. So, what's this all about?
Well, a group of Moe girls walking and talking nonsense most of the time, and supposedly focused on winning a place in the school band and rehearsing as hard as possible. This second part is, again, supposedly to be the main plot but Kyoani preferred to focus on their specialty: giving queerbaiting between cute innocent schoolgirls because yuri-bait helps a lot with merchandising. At least 30% of the camera is entirely focused on schoolgirl thighs just for the sake of having them somewhere rather than giving more space to actual characterization, so far we've been told rather than shown the motivation of the main cast to find the Euphonium, hence the pace of this series is also appalling in spite of having less than 15 chapters.
Characters:
And now the biggest offender: the characters. To be fair, Kyoani never was a studio that gave half a damn about good screenplay or writing, so the closest thing to decent writing that I've ever seen of them is the characterization of Haruhi suzumiya (instead of being a cute retarded cardboard, she's a full sentient girl with bad manners) and the comedy of Nichijou, that worked somehow in each chapter.
Nevertheless, do not be fooled by those who claim that the portrayal of these girls are totally realistic -whose names can be replaced by the main girls from K-ON due to how awfully similar they are-. There's nothing that helps people to point a single trait of personality of ANY of these girls. Why? Because it's not necessary to even try to give them a personality. On the other hand, checking other music-centered animes like Kids on the Slope, Beck or Kono oto Tomare, you can easily make a distinction between each one of their respective casts. Also, there's not character development at all, not saying that this is mandatory but at least the writer could make these moe dolls had some charisma and more traits to convince me to care about them. And before you ask, no, Liz and the Blue Bird is not realistic or even remotely good either, but wins against Euphonium due to the segments of the tale of Liz where animation and music actually merge with each other smoothly and they forget about the high school setting
Overall, it's only worthy if you are a hardcore fan of this overrated studio. Otherwise, I advise you to stay away from it and find the other examples of how great some anime music can be: Nodame Cantabile, Kids on the Slope, Beck, Kono oto Tomare, Forest of Piano.
If you really want to see how good Kyoani can be with their high production values, go check Violet Evergarden or Nichijou, which are so far their best works.
And if you wanted an actual GL story rather than dirty pandering, Revolutionary Girl Utena is always available, or Shinsekai Yori.
