** CINDERELLA “Heartbreak Station” <i> Mercury</i>

Here’s another young hard-rock band with sticky fingers. Cinderella spends most of its third album shoplifting from the Rolling Stones’ catalogue, circa ‘68-72--a far lesser crime, to be sure, than the youthful felonies these Philadelphians committed as purveyors of slick pop-metal on their ’86 debut.

Any band that can achieve a good approximation of the Stones’ raw, cranking classic period--as Cinderella does here-- at least has the validity of a solid bar band. But Cinderella fails to justify and redeem its stylistic thefts by infusing a borrowed sound with a personal perspective.

One exception, “Sick for the Cure,” shows real heart, as leader Tom Keifer captures the tension between soul-sick dejection and joyful release that characterizes some of the Stones’ best stuff.

But most of the songs on “Heartbreak Station” serve up ready-made situations and stock sentiments that come swathed in cliches (it doesn’t help that Keifer, a solid enough singer when he stays within his range, relies mainly on a mangy, upper-register yowl). Yeah, we all need someone we can lean on, but at some point a rock band has to be able to communicate something of its own.

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to five (a classic).