Neko Case in fighting form at the Keswick

A tomboyish siren with a thick red mane and leather lungs, Neko Case is equal parts gender warrior and indie aesthete. That potent hybrid is aptly evoked by the cover of her new album, Middle Cyclone. She crouches for the photo in a Joan-of-Arc-atop-a-muscle-car tableau.

Case is also in possession of what is arguably the greatest voice of her generation – clarion in tone, transnational in its reach, and bottomless in its capacity to transmute wryly observed public fictions into inescapable private truths.

That voice was in fighting form Friday night at the sold-out Keswick Theater, where Case put on a nearly two-hour show largely composed of material from her two most recent (and uniformly excellent) solo albums, Middle Cyclone and 2006's Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.

She opened with the fabulist allegory of "Maybe Sparrow" and closed her set with the resolutely gorgeous "That Teenage Feeling."

Case capped the performance with a lengthy encore that included a wide-screen countrypolitan cover of Sparks' "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth" and ended with the surrealistic dead-lover lore of "Star Witness."

In between, Case & Co. expertly re-created the starry-night campfire reveries of Middle Cyclone's title track and delivered a so-lonesome-I-could-cry reading of "I Wish I Was the Moon" from 2002's Blacklisted.

That song set the tone for the evening: autumnal, lunar-lit, and suggesting, ala Herman's Hermits, that there's a kind of hush all over the world tonight.

Willowy, ruby tressed, and dressed in all-black, Case performed in front of a kitschy movie screen, topped by a giant owl peeking over the top, upon which was projected all manner of grainy art flick b-roll that vaguely mirrored the thematic concerns of the songs.

She was accompanied by a crack five-piece band that included honey-voiced sidekick Kelly Hogan on backing vocals.

Longtime friends and collaborators, Case and Hogan are adepts in the art of the wisecracking gal-pal banter, and their repartee was infectious and lent some welcome levity to a set list long on midtempo somberness.

Complaining that the recent arrival of her period was taking its toll, Case informed Hogan that when the show ended she was going to slip into a suit made entirely of sleeping bags and affix her mouth to the business end of a backwards-working vacuum cleaner filled with potato chips.