1274. Cinderella / Still Climbing. 1994. 3.5/5

1990’s “Heartbreak Station” had somewhat pre-empted what was on the horizon with music generally around the world. Having served up two albums where the image of Cinderella the band had screamed glam metal but had contained songs that fit more into the hard rock motif than anything else, “Heartbreak Station” had followed what other bands around the world were travelling, stripping back all of the overblown effects and getting back to what they called ‘the basics’. It produced an album that tended to split the band’s fandom, with mixed reactions as to its output and direction.
Following the tour to promote the album, the band began to put together ideas for their follow up album. However, they were then hit with the problems that beset band leader, guitarist and lead vocalist Tom Keifer. It was during this time that he was diagnosed with vocal chord paresis which eventually required surgery and a lengthy recovery time, which put the band in limbo for a two year period. Now while that is a considerable time to be out of action, it certainly became more so when you consider that those years were 1991 and 1992, when the music world was turned on its head by the escalation of grunge, a phenomenon that is almost the sole reason that glam metal was forcibly removed from the music scene. However, Cinderella had already begun a move away from that with their previous album, and perhaps both this and the break from releasing an album at the height of this new movement ended up working in their favour.
In an interview some years later, Keifer was quoted as saying "I am writing for the record, and I don't know what voice I am writing for because I don't know if I am going to have a voice." Keifer also stated, "I really didn't ever get to the point where my voice was fully retrained, back and functioning properly, even while we were recording that record." In the long run, Keifer had to adopt a different way of recording his vocals, singing the same line over and over in order to get the sound he wanted. “On Still Climbing, I was going in and singing one line over and over and over, and trying to get my pipes to work right and get the sounds that I wanted. It was just a weird record to make. It was not an easy record to make, but a lot of the songs, I really like. And you know, it is what it is."

For this album, partly to do with the long break, longtime drummer Fred Coury had gone on to pursue other interests, with Kenny Aronoff taking on the drum duties in the studio. The remainder of the band, Keifer, bass guitarist Eric Brittingham and lead guitarist Jeff LaBar remained together.
An interesting part of this album was the use of a couple of songs that had been around for years. Both “Talk is Cheap” and “Freewheelin’” had been played by the band live as early as 1985, though both were slightly different from the versions that ended up on this album. Also, "Hot & Bothered" had first appeared on Wayne's World soundtrack in 1992.
Perhaps the most surprising part of this album is that, unlike so many other bands albums that were released in the same era, they have not felt pressured into changing their sound to match what was going on in the music world around them. “Heartbreak Station” had been a subtle change in direction prior to this, and perhaps that helped the band keep that mindset, despite what had happened to delay this album coming out and what music was like swirling around them.
The opening track “Bad Attitude Shuffle” has a slow start, taking its time to move into the main section of the song and begin its bluesy influenced traction. Theis follows nicely into “All Comes Down”, a great hard rock song, one where you wouldn't know that Keifer had had any trouble with his vocal chords. There is perhaps less grinding in his voice, and he hits some impressive notes throughout, and the trade-off guitar licks and solos are terrific. It holds the same vitality that their songs in the late 1980’s do and kicks the album up a gear from the outset. It’s a ripper, and it segues perfectly into “Talk is Cheap” that keeps that hard rock momentum going. “Blood from a Stone” has a great opening riff and terrific attitude based vocals. These are the kind of songs that Cinderella made their own, on first inspection they mightn’t sound special but the more you listen to them the more they row on you, and you pick up the great pieces that make the track special, the doubled vocals pushing the intensity and the great solo through the heart of the track. The title track “Still Climbing” is a slow burner, very blues influenced by the guitar and keyboard within, sitting in a slow mid tempo and Keifer crooning over the top, which immediately segues into the far more upbeat and faster tempo of “Freewheelin’”. It is a segue that really shouldn’t work at all, at yet here it does beautifully without disturbing the platform laid by the previous track.
It wouldn’t be a Cinderella album if you didn’t have the soft rock ballads, and they appear here once again. “Hard to Find the Words” concentrates heavily on the slow blues based back track, reverberating from the low almost spoken vocal to Keifer’s more recognisable higher pitched squeals, and those atypical ballad based solos. “Through the Rain” heads down the usual route for such a track, based on a more acoustic level song with some light keyboards attached, and vocals sung in a register that tries to attack the heartstrings for an emotional response.
The final throes of the album are just as entertaining as the majority of this album. “Easy Come Easy Go” settles into a similar rhythm that the album endures and is more than listenable. “The Road’s Still Long” is a slow burn which mixes blues guitar with touches of country rock, threatening to break out into a much faster tempo with greater energy than it eventually decides to do. It’s a tease most of the way through. The album then concludes with “Hot and Bothered”, a song that reverts to their earlier sound, a definite AC/DC sounding hard rock song both guitar-wise and vocally, which brings the album to a close in a pleasant and enjoyable tone.

My own love affair with Cinderella had had a few hiccups over the years, and as much as I had enjoyed “Night Songs” and then most of “Long Cold Winter”, I must admit that I had found “Heartbreak Station” a hard sell. There is a real change in the direction the band took with the sound of that album, and at that time I had found it a bridge too far. So, when this was released in 1994 it was not an album that came on to my radar. None of my friends had bought it and I was unwilling to risk the 30 bucks to buy the CD and find it was only going to collect dust on the shelves. So, it wasn’t until the early 2000’s when I began to go back and chase down bands and albums that I hadn’t thought of for a while that I came across “Still Climbing” and decided to give it a go. And it wouldn’t be untoward of me to say that I was mildly surprised with what I found. True, it wasn’t the sound of their early albums, but it was nowhere near as bad as I had imagined it would be. Now, it isn’t an album I have taken out very often over the preceding years – and that is as much to do with the voluminous collection I now have when it comes to choosing an album to listen to when I want to hear some music than anything else – but I have never been disappointed whenever I have,
I’ve had this album on again for the past week, and again have been pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoy it. And what I have thought of most when listening to it is how determined the band must have been to stick to their guns in a musical environment that was a totally different landscape than from a decade before, and they still composed and recorded music that was in their wheelhouse, and did not try to adapt that to what was going on around them. It may not have brought them the commercial success that they would have craved, but as a fan of the band it did gain them my respect as an artist. In fact, the band’s label dropped them after the lack of sales of the album, and the band went into hibernation for a short time to refocus and determine what the future held for them. As it turned out, it was to be a future with constant obstacles ahead of them. While they did tour often, alongside other bands of their late 1980’s heritage, they recorded no new material as a band again. Their final show was in 2014, at which point it was reported that tensions between the members of the band made it unlikely they would tour or record together again. The passing of Jeff LaBar in 2021 seems to have finally closed the door on that ever being explored again.
As a final homage to the band then, “Still Climbing” is not a bad way to conclude their recording career. An album that retains their integrity and stays true to what they believed and enjoyed. In the long run, that is the best any band can hope to achieve.

734. Cinderella / Long Cold Winter. 1988. 2.5/5

I always thought that Cinderella's biggest problem in following up their debut Night Songs was going to be - could they produce anything different from that album? Or, if they were going to travel down the same road, could they make it good enough that it didn't matter that it was the same?
OK, so it's pretty obvious from the opening that they decided to start heading down that same old road, but the start is worth it. "Bad Seamstress Blues / Fallin' Apart at the Seams" is a reasonable opening track, easing you into the album, while the rocking "Gypsy Road" kicks it along nicely, similarly to "Shake Me" from the first album. It's the song that gets you into the album, and you need that early on. Good solo in the middle. However, having sucked you in to the album, this is followed by the power ballad "Don't Know What You Got (Till It's Gone)". Well, it's a bit early in the piece to be introducing this, but I guess this was their 'money song', the one they hoped would get the radio airplay and make them their fortune. Here though it just brings the album to a screeched halt. Again - why stop the momentum of an album by introducing the slow ballad at the wrong time? Madness. "The Last Mile" and "Second Wind" restore some order back to the album, both good tempo songs that move along nicely, which only makes it more strange that they had "Don't Know What You Got (Till It's Gone)" placed where it is.
The title track follows, and really stalls everything. This is a molasses-stretching yawn fest, a real boredom-inducing blues song that, if you like that kind of thing you will probably find is riveting. But for goodness sakes, it just reminded me of the worst of Gary Moore's 1990's blues escapism. Now this album is just mixing genres all over the place. By doing this, how did they expect to entice people to buy it? As it turns out, by the two songs I have just bagged. They were the stars of this album, and boosted its sales to the stars. Shows what I know. But that's personal taste for you.

There is enough here to like for fans of the first album. There is also an obvious movement through to a bluesier rock here as well, so if that tickles your fancy, and you like the occasional power ballad, then no doubt you will be a fan. Even fans of the harder rock side will get  kick out of songs like "Fire & Ice" and "Gypsy Road" and even "Take Me Back". For me though, there is just too much variation in the style of songs here for me to enjoy the album as a whole. I still enjoy pieces of it today, but it's like picking through a box of chocolates to find your favourites and avoid the turkish delights. I would run ten miles to avoid songs such as "Don't Know What You've Got (Till It's Gone)" and "Long Cold Winter". These really do not appeal to me on any level, and cast a pall over the album as a whole. So while the road is similar, it certainly has its diversions, and potholes. Big fans of the band will no doubt love this. I still come away dissatisfied and disappointed with the end result.

Rating:  I guess I've always been a travelling man.  2.5/5

657. Cinderella / Night Songs. 1986. 3/5

If you could cross-pollinate Def Leppard and AC/DC, or at least the voices of Joe Elliott and Brian Johnson, then you would probably come up with Cinderella's Night Songs as a working album. Though it was somewhat noticeable at the time, it is amazing putting this album on again now, closing in on thirty years after its release, that it hits you in the face more so now than then. I'll admit I had forgotten how much this album is like those two bands, certainly for the first few tracks, after which I guess the effect does begin to wear off as you move into Cinderella's debut. Theoretically it is not a bad formula to draw on. Both bands were prominent at the time, and Tom Keifer can't help but be compared to either or both of those lead men in vocals. The fact that the songs themselves seem to replicate the riffs as well could be seen to be dangerous, if there wasn't enough there to just dignify a difference in output and direction.
In the era when hair metal had bands like Motley Crue, Ratt, Poison, Bon Jovi and a dozen others entering the charts, this album musically was far enough removed from them to be successful in its own right. It didn't hurt that they supported Bon Jovi on the Slippery Whet Wet tour, that kind of exposure is priceless.

Depending on your point of view, the songs here have grown with your from this release, meaning they bring some of your past and history with them, or they just sound like relics from a past age that doesn't excite you at all. While I was never a huge Cinderella fan, they were a band I sought out because of the lust for new material in the late 1980's, so much of the album still sits with me in a positive light. "Night Songs" is an interesting start to the album, a slow burner that doesn't explode the album into action but draws you in regardless. "Shake Me" is a great rocking song in the best traditions of bands like (surprise, surprise!) Def Leppard and AC/DC. It lifts the tempo of the album immediately. Strangely then, having done this, it is followed by the soft rock ballad "Nobody's Fool", which brings the album's pace back again. "Nobody's Fool" has a strikingly similar guitar riff and atmosphere to Def Leppard's "Bringing on the Heartbreak" which is impossible for me to ignore or compare it to ("Heartbreak" is better).
From here the album follows a tried and true method, simple drum beat and guitar riffs in hard rock fashion, with Keifer's vocals and guitar solo's adding that final flavour. "In From the Outside" has a bluesier feel to it, though still with a rock element to keep the pace of the album moving. It is almost a portent of what was to come on future releases.

In many ways, the fate of whether you enjoy this album or not lies in when you actually discovered it. If you found it in the late 1980's you will always find you have a positive vibe from the music. If you cottoned onto it in recent years, you may well find that being rooted in the hair metal era means you are unable to get the most from it. While I can't say the same about their following albums, I can always enjoy this whenever I pull it from its case and put it in the stereo.

475. Cinderella / Heartbreak Station. 1990. 1.5/5

When Cinderella made their commercial break through on the back of their debut album “Night Songs”, it was in the time where glam metal was making huge waves in the US market, and beginning to make a go of it in other places around the world as well. Their style that mixes tones of Def Leppard and AC/DC, in their music as well as the vocals of band leader Tom Keifer, found an audience ready to party along with them. It reached #3 on the US album charts, signifying exactly where popular music was headed at the time. When it came to producing their sophomore album, Keifer and his bandmates chose to move away from the direction that bands such as Bon Jovi and Poison continued to pursue. “Long Cold Winter” toned away from the glam metal sound and began introducing more of Keifer’s preference to blues music as the basis of their songs. The overall configuration of the music still weighed heavily in glam metal’s favour but the slight directional change was prevalent. On the back of this album, the band took on a tour that performed 254 gigs in a 14 month period to promote the album. This included being involved in August 1989 with the Moscow Music Peace Festival, playing alongside other metal acts, such as Ozzy Osbourne, Scorpions, Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, and Skid Row. When it came to promoting the band to the biggest audience, this was one of the best ways to do it.
Cinderella now looked to be on the cusp of a major worldwide breakthrough, something that would eventually rest upon the success of their follow up third studio album. Coming at a time when the music world felt as though it too was on the edge of a major moving point, where the style of music being written and performed was about to make a leap of faith in one direction (but then pivoted completely within 12 months of this album being released), the content of this album could possibly decide just how well Cinderella could maintain their own destiny. And that came to pass with the writing, recording and release of the band’s third album which in some ways caught the music world by surprise, with the arrival of “Heartbreak Station”.

The difficulty that comes in reviewing this album is a fairly obvious one for anyone who had listened to Cinderella’s previous two albums prior to this being released. And it is an easy thing for anyone to say who is a huge supporter of the band that this album is a natural progression of the music that Tom Keifer and his bandmates were working towards, which is why it has the style that it does. Because - quite obviously and quite significantly - this is not the kind of album you would expect from the band Cinderella if you had seen or listened to them on their journey over the previous four years.
There are several quotes attributed to Keifer about this album on the Wikipedia page dedicated to the album, and many others in area of the internet if you are willing to do a search. In all of them, he speaks of his disillusionment with the polished rock sound that glam metal had been producing, and that existed on the band’s first two albums, and that when speaking to the mixing engineer for this album, he said to give the songs a rawer feel because, and I quote: "everybody was caught up in that whole '80s' sound. I told him it was time to do something different”. In 2017, in an interview on radio, Keifer was quoted, "I think Heartbreak Station is my favourite because I just love how dry and how raw that record is. And we evolved into that sound, whereas the first two records were a little more 'flavour of the day' in the processing – you know, things were a little slicker and kind of processed in the '80s – and we evolved into this more organic, kind of dry, raw, real sound on Heartbreak Station”.
Nobody could forgive Keifer for going in whatever direction he felt that he wanted or needed to go in. As the main songwriter, it is his prerogative to write and perform the kind of music that he wants to. And the fact that the band’s first two albums were so successful that he could basically do whatever he wanted because, firstly, he had earned the right to; and secondly, must have felt comfortable enough in himself to push for that change, is well within his purview.
But... as a fan of the band, or as a fan of at least one of their previous albums... how are you supposed to process this album in comparison to those other two? The increased introduction of the steel pedal guitar, the slide guitar, the mandolin, the acoustic guitar varieties, the saxophone, the clavinet, piano, organ... all of that is a difficult thing to get your head around. The resulting move towards a heavier blues sound, the country twang that comes as a further result of this, the slower tempo of tracks... all of this is a lot to process if you are a fan coming into the band’s third album. And it is true that other bands were making processed changes to their style at the same time, as a precursor to what happened to music as a whole within the next 12 months. Iron Maiden had stripped back their sound for their “No Prayer for the Dying” album. Gary Moore had completely reinvented himself as a blues guitarist rather than a hard rock guitarist for “Still Got the Blues”. But Maiden still sounded like Maiden, and Gary Moore had publicised well before the event that he was going to do a ‘one-off’ blues album. (That turned into 15 years of it, but that’s another story). This is what Tom Keifer is suggesting is just the natural progression from the previous album, but which is far more than that. What about if you didn’t mind the greasy bluesy touches to Cinderella’s glam metal sound on” Night Songs", but didn't want the full blown blues rock sound that came with “Heartbreak Station”? Well, to his credit (or not), Tom Keifer didn’t care. This was the album he wrote and that Cinderella recorded, and you bought it at your peril. But if you weren’t aware of the sonic change to the music of the band, buying it may have meant you had wasted your money.
If you look at this album purely from the point of view of someone who loves and appreciates blues rock, then there is little doubt the band has produced an album that covers all of the basics in the best way possible. There are faster paced, uptempo vibed tracks such as the opening of “The More Things Change” and “Love’s Got Me Doin’ Time”. “Shelter Me” was the lead single from the album that is somehow classed as a glam metal song but is drenched in saxophone and keyboards and pianos, such that blues is all you hear. The ballad track is the self-titled “Heartbreak Station”, with as much country as blues, the acoustic guitar and steel driven alternative, all pulling together to with the keys and synth to yank every single drip of ballad quality from the song. The remainder of the album produces more of the same, the same mix of blues rock and acoustic ballads. And the album will have been approved by many fans. It went #19 on the US charts, but it did fall off very quickly. And just how many of those people who bought the album did so thinking it would be more of the glam metal they had enjoyed before, only to find that it didn’t suit their music tastes at all due to the huge changes in style? You would think – a bloody lot of them.

Though I was never a huge Cinderella fan, just one who enjoyed the two albums they had released without them ever becoming a band that I was listening to on a regular basis, this album surprised me with what seems to be a huge change in direction musically. Honestly, when you first put on the album, and “The More Things Change” starts, you would dead set start looking at the CD cover to see why you had put on a rockabilly country album. I know I did back when I first heard this album.
On reflection, I can see and hear now the progression that results in “Heartbreak Station” more than I could back on the album’s release. At the time I was of the opinion that here was a hair metal band that wanted to be a country and western band! An interesting career choice, I thought at the time. Send in the steel guitars, bring in the piano. It’s all here, and it’s all a bit of a change. But the tendency towards this had been slightly more noticeable on “Long Cold Winter”, it's just that I didn’t really hear it at the time. And like I’ve said, I wasn’t a huge Cinderella fan, they weren’t taking up hours of my listening time each and every week, they were just coming on for a spin to break up the thrash and heavy that was surrounding me.
By now you will already have discerned exactly what I felt about this album back in 1990 and 1991. In a similar way that I had been knocked off centre by Gary Moore’s “Still Got the Blues” album earlier in the year, “Heartbreak Station” threw a bigger curveball. At least I had been prepared for Gary’s turn to the blues side. I hadn’t been prepared for it with Cinderella. So the album quickly fell out of my listening circle, and moved to a quiet section of my collection.
How often has it come out over the next 30-odd years? Not a lot I can tell you that. With so much music in the world available to listen to, there has to be a reason to fall back to an album that you are far less engaged with. It has had the occasional listen, mostly during times when I have worked through artists and their catalogue, but never because I’ve thought “wow, I can’t believe I have listened to this album for so long. I really should do that now!” So it would be fair and accurate to say that over the last week, I have listened to this album more than I have at any time since I first got the album and was listening to it then. And I am older now, and not so self obsessed with particular bands and albums that I can’t listen to an album like “Heartbreak Station” and appreciate it for what it is and enjoy it. And that is the reflection I have gained from the past week or so. I haven’t minded listening to this album at all. I can take all the vagaries that it throws at me, and just listen and tap along. This is never going to rise to the ranks of one the best albums I own, but I have been able to listen to it over the last week without completely disregarding it as I did back when it was released. It was still for me a strange direction for the band to take, but given that it was a brave one in the environment the band was in, and the massive popularity that they had achieved in such a short space of time, you can only but admire that. This album is not for everyone, and in reality continues to not be for me either, but at least I know that now, if I ever come across someone who actually owns this album, actually listens to this album, and wants to put it on and play it in my presence, that I won’t be completely and totally against hearing it again.