Lausse the Cat: Delving into the mystery of an anonymous jazz master
By the time I arrived in Leeds as a student in 2018, Lausse the Cat had already slipped around a corner and vanished.
As an uninitiated fresher, I arrived in the city with simplistic assumptions, thinking that Leeds was solely an indie and synth-pop stronghold, a city defined by the Kaiser Chiefs, Alt-J and Soft Cell. Instead, I found myself pulled into a thriving jazz ecosystem, across a constellation of venues and through the steady output of Leeds College of Music and its wider orbit (think artists like Nix Northwest, Project Hilts, Têtes de Pois and Vipertime), the city slowly revealing a musical identity far more diverse than I’d expected, and Lausse the Cat was the artist I loved most.
In Leeds, the self-styled ‘Prince of Cats’ and ‘Lord of Bins’ existed somewhere between flesh and folklore, and my older friend James, also a music journalist, would regale with stories of Lausse springing up at house parties in Hyde Park, performing from behind his mysterious cat mask, before disappearing off into the night, to which I would sit and listen, wide-eyed, wishing I’d arrived in the city two years earlier.
His debut album, The Girl, The Cat and the Tree, released in 2018, remains a startlingly immersive body of work, listening to which feels like stepping into a fully realised world of surreal tales of excess, longing and collapse delivered over melancholic, jazz-inflected production. The record balances fantasy involving arcane imagery, mythical characters, and spell-like sounds with piercing realism, particularly in its tender examinations of the messier realities of the lifestyle he was documenting, such as casual entanglements, intoxication, mental health issues, coping mechanisms and excess, all of which were approached with a disarming softness and self-awareness.
In a musical landscape that often prioritises performance over sincerity, this degree of emotional openness felt quite radical. With The Girl, The Cat and the Tree, the French-British rapper, songwriter, and producer wrote himself into UK underground folklore, and then disappeared while his cult fanbase (yes, yours truly included) waited years for their favourite feline to resurface, gradually resigning themselves to the idea that the cat might never click back through the cat flap.
Then, in early November this year (seven years since last putting out music), Lausse returned home, and in his jaws was an hour-long offering called The Mocking Stars. To my ears, it comes remarkably close to perfection, as from the moment you hear the words, “Welcome back my dear children to the Lausse the Cat Show… we find our poor, tattered cat still cold, withered and heartless, whispering to himself through yet another sleepless night”, you are immediately pulled back into his world of long evenings spent skulking across rooftops and trips to 24/7 Sainos, tinged with a lingering sense of uncertainty.
Our anti-hero unleashes all of his greatest tools on this sequel: rich instrumentation, enigmatic characters, and beautifully detailed soundscapes through which you can hear the stars twinkling as you listen. It is an album steeped in a cosmic atmosphere but deeply rooted in the monotony of the everyday, such that if The Mocking Stars were a colour, it would be deep indigo, making for an album designed to be listened to in the early hours of the morning, when you feel like the only person in the world still awake.
Repeated throughout the record is the refrain, “I don’t wanna get a job”, and for the listeners’ sake, I hope he doesn’t, at least in the traditional sense. Though it seems that Lausse himself often seems to feel ill at ease on this Earth, it’s evident to me that he was put here to make music, and while it might have been comforting to find this cat well-fed and glossy-coated seven years on, it’s difficult to imagine Lausse delivering such an exquisite album if those lingering feelings of restlessness and apathy had dissipated.
Like his fellow mask-wearing compatriot MF DOOM, Lausse the Cat remains criminally underrated, and perhaps that’s by design, but it still feels long past time we gave this feline his catnip.
