Bandcamp The cover of Praise the Laze is a small piece of absurdist theatre: a lean, wild-haired man mid-scream, clutching a single dandelion like it owes him money. It fits. Giant Lungs, from Augsburg, play desert-stoner with a streak of the strange, and their second album pushes the sun-baked riffs of the debut into doomier, fuzzier, occasionally proggier territory, “Crab Riders” and “Dead Space Balloon” and “Death by Delay” reading like the tracklist of a band happy to follow a weird idea wherever it rolls.
When the album lets its songs breathe, that adventurousness pays off. “Until the Sky Falls” is the clear highlight, a track the master leaves genuinely dynamic, its fuzz-loaded guitars keeping good string separation over a growling, present bass and organic, natural-sounding drums. The closer “Tourists” works a rawer, drier, almost intimate live feel, low-mid-heavy and a touch muddy but full of character, and mercifully un-squashed. In these moments Giant Lungs sound like exactly the kind of loose, characterful stoner band the desert scene is built on.
The rest of the record fights its own mastering. Too many tracks are pressed into a dense, over-compressed wall that pumps audibly against the limiter, “Aces” and “Death by Delay” chief among them, and the low-mid focus tips several songs into genuine murk, “Dead Space Balloon” losing its individual bass notes entirely in the fuzz. The opener “Resonora” leans on a sterile, over-processed, clicking drum sound that sits oddly against the organic warmth the band clearly prefer elsewhere, and “Crab Riders” turns harsh in the upper mids. The songs are there; the production keeps getting in their way.
Praise the Laze is a gritty, adventurous, likeably weird desert-stoner record with real personality and, in “Until the Sky Falls” and “Tourists,” proof of how good Giant Lungs are when the mix cooperates. It’s held back by a mastering approach that flattens too many of its heavier moments into loudness for its own sake. Taken loud and forgiving, though, its dandelion-clutching strangeness is worth a spin, and a cleaner, more consistent mix next time would let this Augsburg trio really bloom.
Standout tracks: Until the Sky Falls, Tourists, Aces
