Margo Cilker
★★★★ Pohorylle LOOSE. CD/DL/LP
From Oregon to the Basque country, a new alt-country star takes flight. “PAINT A new horizon/Leave my state on a whim,” sings East Oregon’s Margo Cilker on Chester’s, and initially her debut album sounds like a very good, if broadly conventional, slice of Americana. A series of rueful highway travelogues often end in bars: “I’m a woman who drinks deeply,” she admits on the gorgeous Emmylou plaint of Wine In The World,
“it’s my rosy coping mechanism.” The wine, though, is a good Spanish Camarero, and it transpires that Pohorylle isn’t a town in the Pacific Northwest, but the birthname of Spanish Civil War photographer Gerda Taro, picked up when Cilker was travelling in the Basque country. As in wandering, so in music. Cilker clearly loves Gillian Welch and The Band, but she’s not averse to throwing a Dixieland jazz band into the mix on Tehachapi, too. An auspicious new singer-songwriter, not afraid to broaden her horizons.