"We're all going to come and live here," Cave said of America at the Electric Factory on Tuesday, the last date of his U.S. tour. He gestured toward his six-man band, the Bad Seeds, who included the former Birthday Park guitarist Mick Harvey and the wild man violinist Warren Ellis, of the Dirty Three. "It's a very interesting place. Everything seems to be going so well."

Though the 6-foot-2, wicked-thin singer has clearly developed a sense of irony as a survival mechanism over the course of a 30-year career singing bloody murder ballads and wall-of-guitar-noise pelvis-pumpers, it didn't stop him from throwing himself into his electric performance with open-shirted abandon.

Cave has been on a creative roll, overcoming his tendency to drown in a sea of portent with a string of vital releases that rail against the heavens, including 2004's Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, 2006's thundering Grinderman side project, and the excellent new Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, not too mention his screenplay for the fairly awesome 2005 Aussie western The Proposition.

Among his punk-era contemporaries - Cave made his name with the Birthday Party, which disbanded in 1983 - the lank-haired singer has few peers when it comes to continued relevance three decades on. And at the Factory, he demonstrated as much with a 90-minute set whose quieter moments included a smattering of piano ruminations like "Into My Arms" and several smoldering selections from 1996's Murder Ballads.

As is his wont, the charismatic Cave, who played keyboards and guitar while commanding the room with his sonorous voice, mixed the sacred and profane. He stalked the stage on "Hard on for Love," in which he found a woman so sexy "she looks like she walked straight out of Leviticus / They can stone me with stones, I don't care / Just as long as I can get a kiss."

He performed a ripping, riveting and dirty-mouthed version of the traditional American gangster tune "Stagger Lee." And he introduced Lazarus' "We Call Upon the Author," by facetiously explaining that "this song will enlighten you, you will see things more clearly after you hear it," and proceeding to demand, over a barreling beat, that the Almighty be held accountable for a laundry list of iniquities.

"Rampant discrimination, mass poverty, Third World debt, infectious disease, global inequality and deepening social divisions," Cave called out, playing a manic preacher (or irate attorney) demanding that the creator take responsibility. "It does in your brain! And we call upon the author to explain!" No answers were forthcoming from above, though if anyone was listening in, he or she would surely have applauded Cave for a bravura performance.

Read his blog, "In the Mix," at http://go.philly.com/inthemix.