Punk From Coast To Coast -- From California, It's Korn; From New York, Sick Of It All

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Sick of It All, Korn, Orange 9mm and Trial, 5 p.m. Sunday, King Theatre, 1230 Sixth Ave.; $10, 728-1233. -----------------------------------------------------------------

It's bi-coastal hard-core: New York's Sick of It All and those boys from Bakersfield, Korn.

It's difficult to say what location might produce the more severe form of an already-brutal genre. New York is, after all, Gotham. Dark, malevolent, as dank, decayed and quick to hurt and horrify as a Dorian Gray Polaroid. Sick of It All doesn't just embrace the corpse, it speed-drills through its sorry excuse for a heart.

Bakersfield is a cowpoke cluster at the north end of the Grapevine, that treacherous mountain stretch of I-5 that pours an endless stream of cars, trucks, smog and the year-round road company of "Grapes of Wrath." If you're different in Bakersfield, the locals let you know it. No one comes out of high school unscarred. At least, none of Korn did.

Sick of It All was formed by brothers Lou and Pete Koller in the mid-'80s. After a series of singles and entries on punk and hard-core compilation recordings, they released their first LP, "Blood, Sweat and No Tears," in 1989 and began touring nationally. Even though the New York hard-core scene was beginning to dissipate, due in part to the violence it attracted, the band persevered. In 1992, S.O.I.A. released "Just Look Around" and began touring internationally.

It was during this period that a Massachusetts prep school student put on a Sick of It All T-shirt and shot several classmates. National media had a field day with the hard-core connection. Eventually, publications as far afield as The New York Times and Rolling Stone allowed the band space to defend itself.

"Goatless," from the new release "Scratch The Surface," addresses the incident. According to Lou Koller, the title means "scapegoat-less" and refers to authority types who ignore a problem until it blows up in their face. It's a quick, nasty little indictment. As for the rest of the recording, it retains the same breakneck tempos and inflammatory intensity as Sick's previous work, and the stage show is expected to do the same.

The relatively new Korn, while not quite as musically meth-driven as Sick of It All, is nonetheless monstrously manic.

The band's propensity for striking a mean, rumbling groove throughout its music suggests leanings more toward hip-hop than punk, until you include the grand mal vocals and stage antics of lead singer and lyric forger Jonathan Davis. Davis, who was an autopsy assistant for five years, considers the world a pretty screwed-up place, and his tales of every kind of abuse imaginable mirror that planet.

Korn now makes its home in the Southern California ocean community of Huntington Beach. However, that Bakersfield mindset always looms in the background, as surely as New York does for Sick of It All. And though they may be bi-coastal, these bands have one thing in common: They're scary.