Even when he’s trying to be good, Nick Cave is a bad, bad man.

I know why you might be snorting (yes, derisively) right about now: What, am I supposed to be scared? Ooh, I’m a-shiverin’. Big bad Nick Cave. Yeah, he used to be a badass motherfucker and howling junkie with the Birthday Party two decades ago. Then he came too late to the Lollapalooza party—or maybe it was too early, since the day stage never flattered him—to baffle and bore Chili Peppers fans; you got the feeling he was only there because Kim and Thurston were giving props. Now he’s in his 40s. He lives in some posh London manor with his supermodel wife and keeps diaries of the weather. His Bad Seeds are international balding barflys in bad suits, and worse yet, his last album was soft in the middle and God all around. Nick Cave, an unironic Bible scholar casting his own iconography in a mold that’s equal parts Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash and Grandpa Munster (it’s the goth thing). Nick Cave is a creepy uncle with war stories.

I don’t mean any of that. Except for the factual stuff, which is factually true. The subjective lot of us here know that Cave has aged with rare grace, a still impossibly skinny frame and near-recluse whose No More Shall We Part (his aforementioned last album) is the best collection of songs he’s ever released. Tonight, he’s on Broadway at the Beacon Theatre, on a stage flanked by 25-foot-tall Greek-drama statues, below an ornate, conical ceiling fixture that hangs above him like the sword of Damocles, facing orchestra seating and two tiers of gorgeously inlaid balconies. In the kind of black suit that never matches a smile, Cave commands and stalks and points, casting shadows on the theatre sides that one concertgoer later describes as “dinosaurs creeping along the walls.” Of the six-piece Bad Seeds, guitarist Blixa Bargeld stands stone-still, German and stoic. Violinist Warren Ellis (also of the Dirty Three) crouches and lurches in a burgundy petticoat in a pretty fantastic Mr. Hyde impression.

Manufactured danger? Not fucking likely. Whereas Slipknot or Alice Cooper try to creep you out with ghoulishness, Cave is interested in text-heavy horror, a kind of books-are-scarier-than-movies fear: of God, of the devil and of misguided, God-loving humans. Cave has three modes of song tonight, the first of which essays his mid-‘80s to mid-‘90s work (sketched thumbnail-wise on his best-of collection): “Red Right Hand,” “The Weeping Song” and “The Ship Song” are classic bulwarks for the newer songs—these U.S. dates are something of a do-over for the No More Shall We Part tour that never happened last fall due to September 11—that all share a churning-ocean kind of restlessness. “Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow” and “Oh My Lord” build in intensity before combusting like burnt-out stars; “God Is In The House” and the album’s title track find Cave sedately seated at the piano, yet still booming with his powerful and occasionally strained baritone.

However, things become most raucous with the third incarnation of Cave song: those from 1996’s Murder Ballads. The night ends on the second encore with the stomp and rant of “Stagger Lee”: “Yeah, I’m Stagger Lee and you better get down on your knees,” he bellows. “And suck my dick, because if you don’t you’re gonna be dead.”

Nick fucking Cave is a bad, bad man.

—Matthew Fritch