The kick about Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band doing Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town this week, at the tail end of the iPod decade, has not only been hearing the two seminal 1970s Springsteen works sequenced as they were they intended to be as LP length artistic statements.

It's been getting to do the compare and contrast exercise between the two, and hear how Springsteen and his vision evolved in the time between when BTR landed him on the cover of Time and Newsweek in 1975 and the release of Darkness to diminished expectations in 1978. "It's a record that really was very important to me," Springsteen said before exploding into "Badlands" at the Spectrum on Wednesday. "It came out three years after Born To Run, and everybody had thought we had disappeared, or gone back to the swamps of Jersey. It took awhile before it got the kind of affection it's given now."

Both of the albums work with familiar Springsteen motifs - guys in cars, for instance, though the dude who's "pulling out of here to win" with Mary in the passenger seat in "Thunder Road" is all by his lonesome as he heads "straight into the storm" in "Promised Land." And there were plenty of air-punching moments on both BTR's last chance power drive on Tuesday and the live-it-every-day urgency of  "Badlands" on Wednesday, which featured the guy in front of me thrusting his soft pretzel in his right hand skyward in between gulps of the beer in his left. 

But working with similar raw materials, the two albums offer startingly different perspectives. The characters in Born to Run and the soaring, Spectorian arrangements filled up ther cavernous old room on Tuesday with their mythic hopes and dreams. By the time Darkness fell on Wednesday, however, their lives had become frightening real, even when they were carved out of Biblical (and Steinbeckian) raw material, as in the hellacious "Adam Raised A Cain," the first of Springsteen's trio of great songs about his father, "who walks these empy rooms looking for something to blame." (The other two I've got in mind are The River's "Independence Day" and Nebraska's "My Father's House." Tunnel of Love's "Walk Like A Man" isn't bad either.)

 "These songs have been in our setlist for 30 years," Springsteen said at the start of Darkness, and in that, he was mainly referring to lynchpins like "Badlands," "Promised Land" and "Prove It All Night," which feel the world closing in, and push back hard, with defeat not an option. But that ultimate uplift is only part of the Darkness story. Hearing the album performed in its entirety - from the rueful "Factory" to the raw boned wail of "Streets Of Fire " - was a reminder that there's a lot of Darkness where no light gets in.

In 1978, just as British and American punk rock were upending the music world,  Darkness hit as Springsteen's fiercest, hardest-rocking album, and along with the uncompromised, almost all-acoustic Nebraska, its the one that comes closest to a punk sensibility. It also sounds almost like metal at times, with both "Adam" and "Streets," and Springsteen's appreciation for country cadences first come to the fore with "Factory."

Darkness also marks the emergence of Springsteen the working class existentialist: "Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life," he sang matter of factly on Wednesday, and drew out the I-can't-go-on/I'll-go-on theme in the most chillingly beautiful moments of the Spectrum stand so far. That was the stately and elegaic "Racing In The Street," where his hero can't help but head out in his hotrod, because there's nothing else to do. "Some guys they just give up living, and start dying little by little, piece by piece," he sang before Roy Bittan and Charles Giordano's dual keybaords took it away on the coda. "Some guys come home from work and wash up, and go racing in the street."

So which album was more effective, when delivered from front to back, live? Born to Run was made for big rooms like the Spectrum, which may be comparatively intimate next to the Wachovia Center, but is no Johnny Brenda's in terms of coziness. So "Backstreets" and "Jungleland" filled up the space grandly. Darkness is smaller and built more for one-on-one soul searching communication than communal transcendance. But while Born To Run raises your spirit, Darkness tears you up inside, and it sure did that for me, all over again, on Wednesday. And because its songs are less frequently performed live, hearing it as a unified statement made for a rarer treat.

As for the rest of Wednesday's show: It was shorter, though still exhaustive by anyone's standards but Springsteen's, at 2 hours 45 minutes. It began with "Thundercrack," the early '70s Wild & Innocent outtake whose reputation has grown inflated over the years. Early on, Working On a Dream's "Outlaw Pete," was replaced by that album's dark and impassioned "What Love Can Do." A good move, which had Bruceheads asking each other 'What's this?' a measure of how much Springsteen has abandoned his new album on this tour that raised the possibility that maybe the WOAD shouldn't have been so quickly dismissed after all. 

Patti Scialfa - "the First Lady of the E Street Band"  - was back after taking night one off, and all seemed well between the singer-guitarist and her Big Boss Man. They looked like they were about to start playing tonsil hockey in a hot and heavy "Human Touch" that was one highlight, along with a kooky polka "Sherry Darlin" that featured Bittan, Giordano and Nils Lofgren all playing accordions. "That's entertainment!" exulted the ringmaster.

The run up to the finish was not as fearsome or jam-packed as the night before, without either "Because The Night" or "No Surrender." (Heartbreak of the night, for Bruce geeks: "Be True," the much loved B-side, was on the original set list, but dropped.) And while the show overall was not as incandescent - it's tough to be wildly dynamic, for three hours straight on back to back nights, at 60 - the encores offered more of a loose, freewheeling party. A request was granted for "Ramrod," and the "Detroit Medley" roared, before "Rosalita" came out to close the show. 

That's it, till Monday. 

Previously: Springsteen Set List, Night Two