Whitesnake’s ‘Slip’: Comedy or Error? : WHITESNAKE “Slip of the Tongue.� Geffen * 1/2: <i> Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to five (a classic). </i>

Whitesnake, formed in the late ‘70s as sort of a poor man’s Deep Purple--and a good one--started selling a few records only when it became a poor man’s Led Zeppelin instead. Then a couple of years ago, fluffy singer David Coverdale jettisoned the rest of the band, became the poor man’s Def Leppard, sold 6 million records in the United States and didn’t have to open for Motley Crue any more. It was a triumph, tribute to both Coverdale’s perseverance and the way his sarong-clad girlfriend, Tawny Kitaen, looked in the MTV videos.

This year, Whitesnake is the poor man’s--oh, Styx or something--a primordial soup of arena-rock cliches stunning in its banality, even by blow-dryer metal standards, and perfect for both nostalgia buffs and 13-year-old romantics. Unless, of course, “Slip of the Tongue� is really a comedy album, in which case it’s right on.

So when Coverdale isn’t singing “A hard-lovin’ woman like you needs a hard-lovin’ man,� it’s “Girl, I’m gonna shake you down,� or “Love will keep us warm / On the wings of the storm.� Half the songs begin with a portentous synthesizer whoosh, and almost all of them pause in the middle to let misused guitarist-for-hire Steve Vai go wheedle-a-wheedle-a-wheedle-a for a while. And the ballad “Sailing Ships� even rips off Kansas, specifically “Dust on the Wind,� bane of many a high school prom.