Cinderella
Still Climbing

THE REVIEW

An album unfairly dismissed. I believe that on the web it's up to me to play the devil’s advocate, but I want those looking for information on "Still Climbing" (1994) to also hear an opposing voice without prejudice.

That's why I’ll start with what, in my opinion, did not convince those who listened to the album. Firstly, the courage to make this music that does not give an inch to the trends of the time: I think this is the reason for hasty listens and judgments like "yes, good, goodbye". The eleven tracks proposed by Tom Keifer and his associates are often quite long, and I imagine they were perceived as repetitive. Hence the last potential weakness of this work: despite the return to some sounds from "Long Cold Winter" and the continuity on the path of "Heartbreak Station", this album is neither immediate nor easy listening. On the contrary, it requires a high metabolism time because the components that animate it are complex, articulated, diverse, and so well-developed that they form a perfect whole where it is difficult to distinguish the individual elements.

Having said that – I myself was a victim of the last observation I made for a while – I’ll now share my personal vision of the fourth full-length from Cinderella. Take it as you will. From the times of the "Saints In Hell", many things have changed in the soul of Tom Keifer. The Cinderella experience, in the height of the 80s, marked both him and rock. His gypsy band, gypsy by vocation and migrant by nature, never lingered too much on purely glam territories, remaining wonderfully on the margins and thus becoming a cult for all 80s rock lovers: a unique ability to marginalize themselves to become desirable. Like the mysterious and dark charm of wanderers, Cinderella built their image as caravan rockers, covering themselves in wild animal skins, from cheetah to zebra, and veils like fortune tellers. Indeed, their music has never been an example of digestibility, but since the beginning with "Night Songs" and up to the previous “heartbreak station”, success was always guaranteed. Initially from tough and set tracks, then from super sweet ballads. The best virtue and worst limit (but not for me) of Cinderella remains Tom Keifer. An immense personality probably victim of his prosaic and simultaneously poetic artistic genius. A fleeting comparison makes me relate him to Marcel Proust. A page and a half without a period. So Tom Keifer writes, writes, writes and composes texts and melodies that from the verbal synthesis of a Push, Push! reach the The Road's Still Long of Still Climbing. Here, the mechanism that moves this album becomes full of gears and humors that make this army of notes fluid, released late (alas!) due to the outbreak of the Gulf War.

Blues and auteur hard rock are the genre boldly proposed by the Philadelphia quartet, which for this obsessive work relies on the collaboration of no less than eleven other members among musicians and choristers. Do you get the hint? If you go look at who wrote all the lyrics, then you can also understand that this album is the novel Tom Keifer kept inside for ten years. (Another highly punishable literary comparison) Like Miguel Cervantes combined an infinite variety of literary genres, here the legendary Tom has kneaded poetry, diary pages, and free prose, protecting them with the shields of the finest forges: blues, country, hard rock. I get disgusted by the music market generated by grunge: if you’re not like this, you're a corpse. In this perspective, herein lies the indifference towards this work. And yet, the step back everyone talks about, for me, is a step forward. Tom Keifer decided to abandon even the last glamorous airs to dig inside himself and compose the album of the soul. No wink, no pat on the back, nothing at all to be liked. Just music (sometimes almost at the level of a musical) that emboldens his spirit, a strong form of expression, a way to extrovert himself, like a painting or a poem. Everything is full of details. Breaths, moans, gasps, diaphragm movements are rendered by winds like the trombone that more than once, almost imperceptibly, carries an entire track with a low and rough tone. Those who hear these things in the album can understand why it is a great album. Those who miss these details do not know what they are listening to. This tracked vehicle brazenly furrows the clods of hard blues terrain. The techniques used are varied. The sounds produced as well. Acoustic guitars brushing the banjo almost seem to produce that rhythmic sound of oriental trinkets moved by the wind hanging above doors. I think of a music box. Blues is suffering, in some cases resignation. The death of Tom’s mother leads him to compose the greatest ballad our guys have ever proposed: "Hard To Find The Words". And then an excruciating, long, destructive melancholy that invades even the theoretically livelier tracks, from the overture of "Bad Attitude Shuffle", retro like the music listened to in the 30s, to the wonderful "Talk Is Cheap", which screams while it cries. I leave the other tracks to you. I’ll keep this "Still Climbing" close.

Posthumous work of a living person.