Review: Ladystache, Older and Wider

LadyStache’s Steph Tolev and Allison Hogg exist on a higher plane of riffing than most of us. Their second album Older and Wider thrives on how its characters perplex one another: they get poke and prod, point out the other’s absurdities, and challenge their respective understandings, all across a series of loosely structured, very funny conversations.

It helps that the pair find a wealth of scenarios to twist around: Crystals has a shopper mystified by a gemstone-obsessed shop owner, while Night Time Songs finds a child horrified by mother’s dark choice of lullabies. Godmother divides long-term friends over one’s insistence on being a godmother to the other’s soon-to-be-born child, and Royal Doultons enhances an uncomfortable conversation across a chairlift with effective foley and a perfect scene-ending button joke.

Across Older and Wider’s eleven sketches, Tolev and Hogg prove themselves sharply attuned to both the worlds they conjure and each other’s buttons within them. It’s easy to be drawn into their character-driven absurdity.

Older and Wider was released January 31, 2020 on Comedy Records.
Listen to it here.