The sparse æsthetic of Thalia Zedek’s post-Come solo recordings hasn’t made her any less intense, or any less prolific. Downstairs at the Middle East last Wednesday, Zedek and her band — Come drummer Daniel Coughlin and violist Dave Curry — played a charged set that included a few songs from Been Here and Gone, her solo debut on Matador, and You’re a Big Girl Now, the more intimate one-off she released on the local label Kimchee last year, but was defined by newly penned material. Indeed, she closed with a piece so fresh it’s still called " new song. "

Zedek is by now a Boston legend on the level of Mission of Burma. Before fronting Come, she made her local debut in the experimental rock band Uzi; then she departed for New York City and joined up with the avant-outfit Live Skull. In her current incarnation, she mixes influences that should be familiar to fans of her earlier work — bluesy Stones guitar chordings and Dylanesque turns of phrase. Her voice is sweeter and more smoothly melodic than it was in those days when her raw, ravaged roar matched the growl of her guitar; its power now seems to draw on something deeper than rage, a spiritual quest for big answers that kept insisting in lines like " All your promises, they ain’t worth a damn " and " She said pray for me, like I pray for you " (from the new " Bus Stop " ).

Through most of the set, she played what amounted to bass parts on a tuned-down guitar while Curry supplied poignant, serpentine leads on viola. Coughlin fleshed out the swells and curves of Zedek’s elegiac compositions with grace and authority. The trio maintained a taut dynamic tension from start to finish, from the sublimely beautiful cover of V’s " 1926 " to the noisy crescendo that ended the performance. That left Australian headliners the Dirty Three, whose fans filled the room, with a tough act to follow; their " Battle of Evermore " -like jams couldn’t match the visceral punch of Zedek’s performance.