*** Spalding Gray

IT'S A SLIPPERY SLOPE

(Mercury)

Hard to believe, but this is the first of Spalding Gray's many monologues to be released as an album. It's also the producing debut of James Taylor. In audio terms, the result is just your standard spoken-word recording, as Taylor augments 73 minutes of Gray's chatter with some snippets of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony and some judicious, unobtrusive sound effects. Of course, Gray's own voice is his own best sound effect -- not just his expertise at mimicking, say, a tape winding down in a player with dying batteries, but also his trademark crescendos of dramatic intensity. The topics of the monologue, as comical and self-lacerating as any of his previous works, include becoming a father, dealing with his own Rhode Island WASP parents, ending his relationship with long-time girlfriend and collaborator Renee Shafransky, and finally learning in midlife to ski. Gray uses this last as a metaphor for becoming an active, risk-taking participant in his own life rather than a detached observer. Of course, if he has truly shaken off his passivity, this may also be his last recorded monologue.

-- Gary Susman