KEVIN SHIELDS “Cavity Fever” (Arbor)

Live, Eva Aguila likes to grind this turn-of-the-century-looking metal crank and run that through a bunch of distortion pedals and kill everyone with ears, but on recordings the crank is less prevalent. This is especially true on “Cavity Fever.” The opener, “Homely Straw,” is a pensive passage of mixer bleeps and numb robot gas…and although subsequent jams like “Lovely Day Is A Hike Day” don’t shy away from shrill sine-wave dog-frequencies, nothing is as brutally “face down in a tank of electric eels” as the tracks on her recent Deathbomb full-length (“The Death of Patience”). The B side tracks are a bit more merciless and mechanized than the relative tranquility of the A stuff, but I’m splitting hairs here. Cartoon monster heads blooming into fat turnips adorn the J-card courtesy of World Breaker George Myers, and it’s a predictably sweet thing to stare at for a while.