It should come as no great shock that the debut album by this Philadelphia glitz-metal band has zoomed straight into the Top Twenty. Night Songs is the familiar sound of high-decibel adolescence, Seventies arena machismo decked out in Eighties snakeskin and lace. Cinderfella Tom Keifer certainly has his Steven Tyler pout down cold, and half of his ten originals move to the same slow, door-slamming AC/DC beat. Indeed, even hardcore heavy metal loyalists would have to admit they've seen and heard it all before – the Mötley Crüe haystack-gone-haywire hairdos, Keifer's Brian Johnson-meets-Klaus Meine yowl, the obligatory overblown epic ballad ("Nobody's Fool") with its melancholy stairstep guitar figure and hammerhead chords.

Frankly, the members of Cinderella would get a lot more than their hair messed up in a head-on collision with thrash-metal panzers like Metallica, Anthrax or Megadeth. But love 'em or loathe 'em, these guys aren't wimps. "Hell on Wheels" and "In from the Outside" are solid rockers, powered by good grinding riffs. And it's not hard to imagine Scorpions-style grunge like "Back Home Again" and "Nothin' for Nothin'" going over big in the Keystone State bars where the band was discovered by label mate Jon Bon Jovi. Too much of Night Songs, though, is pose, not punch; Andy Johns's production has none of the panoramic vitality of Robert John Lange's 3-D studies of Def Leppard (Pyromania) or AC/DC (Back in Black).

Cinderella at least has its look and its noise together, which is more than you can say for most groups fresh out of the clubs. But they need to jazz up their material and cut away the clichés if they're really interested in hard-rock immortality. Otherwise, their platinum dreams are going to turn into pumpkins. (RS 486)

DAVID FRICKE