Lausse The Cat creates a dream world on his new album, one in which his jazz-inflected hip-hop merges with touches of bossa nova, drum and bass and picturesque ad-libs. The record unfolds like a richly produced bedtime story, its songwriting and detail-loving production opening passages into other spheres.
Lausse achieves this through his alter ego, The Cat, which on the album grapples with themes of loneliness, a lack of perspective and emotional unease. These hazily poetic trains of thought are carried by gentle saxophone solos, yearning trumpet lines and childlike, playful xylophone passages. Although the underlying beats often remain stripped back, it is precisely these instrumental outbursts – along with the recurring lyrical shifts into French – that give the album its intense dreamlike quality.
This becomes especially clear on »The Midnight Hour«: over more than ten minutes, an interplay unfolds between languages, clattering, thundering and mewing onomatopoeia, and symbolically charged formulations. It is precisely in this layered quality that the strength of The Mocking Stars lies. It works best through headphones, because only there does it become fully apparent how carefully Lausse The Cat interweaves atmosphere, language and production.
