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.
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