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New York trio Barky understands that mixing rock exuberance and the chin-scratching experimentalism of avant-garde jazz is a lukewarm proposition for the average listener. The group’s debut album, after all, is titled A Study In Rocking. Barky certainly doesn’t hide the fact that its music is tricky to play—Scott Barkan’s guitar skitters across fractured scales, and drummer Brook Martinez and bassist Noah Jarrett are damnably hard to count along with. But it’s completely fun and agreeable in its weirdness, a little like Deerhoof at its most happy-go-crazy but with an ear for fluid melodies instead of just abrasively scrunched-up chords.

Or check out this review from Below Standard Magazine:

A STUDY IN ROCKING, the self-released debut from the New York instrumental rock oufit, Barky, is the kind of record that occupies challenging aesthetic territory. Not challenging for the listener, but for the artist. For all of its metric modulation, this record is supremely rocking, perhaps because each of the odd time signatures on the record is felt as a corruption or mutation of 4/4, a fact owing as much to drummer Brook Martinez and bassist Mike Lavalle’s understanding of movement and groove as to guitarist Scott Barkan’s compositional preoccupations. They don’t play when they don’t need to. Every note from the rhythm section is for the sake of groove and intensity, a kind of avant-conservatism. The melodies are extremely vocal (a breath of fresh air in the creative music scene). That vocality is the real genius of the record: what Felix Mendelssohn called “songs without words.” And as out as the improvisations get, they never do violence to the sweet simplicity of the tunes themselves, a fact which seems to define the band’s aesthetic, specifically regarding the relationship between form and content. The sometimes complex and brainy compositions all grow from melodic and rhythmic material that is exceedingly intuitive and catchy. The first truly shining moment on the album occurs during the discordant improv section of “Ladies and Gentlemen.” At moments like these Barky can play with all the tension and expressive dissonance of Neil Young and Crazy Horse with the advantage of being a more sensitive group of improvisers. The strongest track on the album is “Sweet, Sweet Maggie O’Flannigan.” The song is groovy and tuneful, and a strong showcase of Barky’s compositional and technical prowess. Maureen Hart