Margo Cilker review – perfectly crafted Americana for the open road

‘Every single one of her songs sounds like a time-worn standard’: Margo Cilker at the Old Blue Last. Photograph by Sophia Evans/the Observer

Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

There are roughly 150 people in the upstairs room of this east London pub, gently poaching in their own body heat. Really, though, everyone here is miles away – transported to a small town in New Mexico, or to Bilbao in the rain, or to the expanses of the Pacific north-west by an extraordinary American singer-songwriter whose talents tower in inverse proportion to the size of this bijou venue.

Just when it seemed like every country and western byway had been exhausted, strip-mined for all its hardship and romance by everyone from Hank “Ramblin’ Man” Williams onwards, this young US troubadour has pulled off the unlikely trick of remaking that dusty, worn trope anew. “If you asked me, babe, I would tell you what I wanted,” Margo Cilker sings on Bilbao Precipitation. “It’s just an open road and I the only soul upon it.”