Contemporary big-band recordings are a rarity. Big bands with overtly political aims are rarer still. But Matthew Herbert has never been one for the ordinary; whether using a Big Mac as an instrument to attack McDonald's (on The Mechanics of Destruction) or offering a corollary to the medical funk of his friends Matmos (on Bodily Functions), he operates from a set of principles. While Herbert employs sampling, the first rule in his personal contract for the composition of music is that he can't sample "sounds that exist already." Instead, he raids his own archive and compositional process; the sampling on Goodbye Swingtime adds edges of ghostly magnificence to an already impressive big-band sound.

The stringent recording guidelines Herbert sets for himself are ironic since his copious (as usual) notes about making his latest album emphasize the freedoms of working on an independent label. Goodbye Swingtime certainly benefits aesthetically from this independence. The CD's artwork, by Hopper, is unconventional and striking. Its front cover is a glossy black nightscape outlined by silver and some bursts of fluorescent color. The inside reworks the same image via a pop-up-book effect: seven pages, each a visual plane, cut so that silhouettes of people, animals, and mosques emerge only to be semi-obscured. A reading list – citing Spice Girls biographies and Borges – is laid out in a broken spiral pattern on the disc itself.

Flashes of brashness in Pete Wraight's horn arrangements, combined with the musique concrète undercurrents, occasionally call Esquivel to mind. Herbert and Wraight usually don't aim for a celebratory or zany effect, though; "Chromoshop" is a sinister march worthy of Kurt Weill, even if there's no Lotte (or Billie or Ella) among the album's five vocalists and little Brecht-like nuance to the polemical lyrics. When sampled rather than sung, the politicism – the sound of specific texts from a Web site being printed, for example – is elliptical. War, and protests against it, provide the backdrop of more than one song here, but traditional instrumentation is Goodbye Swingtime's strong point. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Daiquiri
Box Office Poison (Kharbe)

Ottawa duo Daiquiri are an annoying band. Not annoying like a gnat in your ear or sand in your underwear but more like a dog humping your leg. At first their delivery on Box Office Poison seems equally unsubtle. Vocalist Mike Hickey enunciates his sarcastic lyrics – about tanning salons, cokeheads, and stalker ex-girlfriends – in such an overdone, geeked-out manner that you can practically see his neck veins bulge with every syllable. Guitarist Leigh Newton, who also takes care of the bass, keyboards, and drum programming, keeps pace by making the music as loud and hyperactive as possible at nearly every moment.

But there's more happening below the surface, such as the pretty, Aphex Twin-like synth melody buried in the chorus to "Snowman" or the 360-degree electronics collage that runs through "She's a Stayer." Subtlety is also present in the brilliantly pointless lyrics to "Letter Opener," a collision of grindcore and new wave that sounds nothing like the Locust (probably the best-known band to head-butt those genres together). That said, the main reference points here are early-'70s Sparks, the grotesque noise-metal pileups of Faxed Head, and an overriding sense of trashiness that encompasses everything from glam rock to Rick James to Beverly Hills 90210. There's also a barely hidden obsession with modern R&B, which finally surfaces in an untitled Missy Elliot-Madonna medley toward the end of the CD (and ultimately winds up buried in Slayer-esque metal-guitar overload).

For all the diverse influences, the end result will draw inevitable comparisons to spazzy, metal-based eclectics such as Mindless Self Indulgence and System of a Down as it gains more exposure. Ten years ago the comparisons would have been to Faith No More's Angel Dust or Fishbone's Give a Monkey a Brain ... – you know, music for naughty teenage boys who still had the good sense not to listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. God help me, I still like Angel Dust and Give a Monkey a Brain .... Unlike those albums, I doubt you can find Daiquiri's music in shopping malls – in fact, I'm pretty sure you still have to order it online. Anyhow, Box Office Poison is a stellar example of bad taste gone good (or vice versa). I love it; you may not. (Will York)

Homosexuals
The Homosexuals (ReR Megacorp)

The Homosexuals were a collective of musicians active in the late-'70s British DIY scene. In the three years they spent completely undoing the pop music that came before them, they released a single and an EP while recording tons of other songs that never really made it off their four-track. They all went on to play in a million other bands nobody normal's ever heard of. The other thing you need to know is that they lived next door to equally obscure, seminal band This Heat. Legends have a tendency to grow out of situations like this, especially when the single the Homosexuals released is "Hearts in Exile," a weird-as-hell, Velvet-y, dub-damaged pre-indie rock pop anthem that seems to be telepathically linked to early Clean stuff. The B-side is "Soft South Africans," which has the same angular guitars as any Gang of Four song except that after the first verse, they stretch the song like a piece of gum and these psychedelic guitar leads come strafing in on top of an inexplicable acoustic guitar track. Then it turns into a Yardbirds-covering-Muddy Waters-type blues jam, complete with crappy harmonica playing!