`ALMOST' ISN'T ENOUGH.

Byline: Fred Shuster Daily News Music Critic 

``It's All Been Done,'' sang Canada's high-octane Barenaked Ladies, perhaps summing up today's rock scene in the title of one of their hits Friday during the opening night of KROQ's pair of ninth annual ``Almost Acoustic Christmas'' shows at the Shrine Auditorium.

The 6,000-plus young fans at the popular eight-act event also responded loudly to radio hits from Blink 182, Offspring, Reel Big Fish and Sugar Ray, while paying attention to Hole, the Cardigans and Korn.

The two-day Christmas show, which this year relocated from the Universal Amphitheatre to the Shrine, always sells out in an instant, but much of Friday's lineup suffered from monotony. One-dimensional acts like Korn, Sugar Ray, Blink 182 and Reel Big Fish offered energetic but ultimately empty sets.

Predictably, Courtney Love was the night's wild card and musical highlight, appearing at first unsteady but later showing that first impression was the result of a calculated pose. Fronting her band Hole, Love sang ragged but right versions of ``Malibu,'' ``Celebrity Skin'' and other pop-rock gems from her new album.

At one point, the charismatic guitarist and singer introduced a friend named Eduardo whom she said she'd ``picked up'' on Hollywood Boulevard. The fellow, who turned out to be Love's beau, actor Edward Norton, strummed an acoustic guitar in the background for a song before giving Love a quick kiss and sprinting off stage.

The evening's other memorable moments came courtesy of Offspring, who kept the goofing around to a minimum, aside from an opening gambit that involved two pairs of little people dressed in s&m gear for a dance routine to cover versions of Soft Cell's ``Sex Dwarf'' and Devo's ``Whip It.'' Afterward, the Orange County quartet churned out a lively set of well-arranged, melodic pop-punk tunes such as the current hit, ``Pretty Fly (For a White Guy).''

Barenaked Ladies, Reel Big Fish and Blink 182 drew a strong response from the youngest members of the audience, who welcomed the groups' jungle-gym stage antics and vapid ditties like Blink's radio hit, ``Dammit (Growing Up).''

Playing early in the evening, Sweden's Cardigans miscalculated by concentrating on several slow, droney dirges that kept new arrivals firmly in their seats or in the lobby's long beverage lines.

Those who didn't leave the downtown auditorium to race to the Roxy, where Hole was playing a just-announced after-midnight set, heard Korn's approximation of Mettalica, minus the material. The frowning Bakersfield thrash quintet, which enjoyed a huge commercial breakthrough this year, does one thing over and over, a hard-on-the-ears single-chord stop-and-start effect that has indeed all been done many times before.

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Photo: Courtney Love of Hole wows the crowd during the first night of KROQ's ``Almost Acoustic Christmas'' show at the Shrine Auditorium.