Samantha Crain specialises in austerity Americana, stripped-back tales of hard-scrabble heartbreak that chime with our current age of financial and emotional uncertainty. With her hairline-fracture voice, the 28-year-old Oklahoman breathes life into a series of vividly drawn characters who exist on the fringes, their ambitions often reduced by inescapable circumstance. Crain’s albums – her fourth, Under Branch & Thorn & Tree, was released last month – tend to be atmospheric, tender and raw. Perhaps inevitably, they are also often a bit of a downer.

In contrast, Crain is extremely funny in person. In front of a thin but awed crowd, she breaks the ice with a wicked story about a wedgie and gives a shoutout to Jack Black’s raucous comedy School of Rock. Accompanied by her support act Benedict Benjamin on a second acoustic guitar, she rattles through Killer, her current, deceptively off-kilter single that sides with the poor and overrun against a manifestation of the devil, and Outside the Pale, a protest song that jabs a sharpened stick in the eye of those who can’t see beyond “sex and property”. Later, she and Benjamin also manage to keep straight faces as they playfully recreate the studio fade-out of Big Rock, perhaps her most bumptious song.

Unfortunately, it’s one of those gigs where little things keep going wrong, notably the unexpected expiration of a long-serving guitar strap. Crain is enough of a road veteran to remain unflappable in a crisis, but the increasing downtime between songs as she wrangles duct tape disrupt any sense of momentum. The bodged repair does add an extra layer of poignancy to Elk City, the story of a woman stranded in a post-boom town who has her weary head turned by a guy who claims he can fix her washing machine. Performed solo with some skilled fingerpicking, it’s one of Crain’s finest, and suggests a bright future for her, if not her burdened creations.

• At Gullivers, Manchester, 4 August. Box office: 020-7729 0937. Then touring.