With an easy country shuffle It’s Gonna Change conjures up images of flannel shirts, jeans, and high-top sneakers with a anxious but hopeful youth kicking about abandoned grain silos littered with broken whiskey bottles and crumpled cans of beer. It is a roots rock album that pulls a page from the Mellencamp and Young songbooks focusing on the struggle to make ends meet and that twitchy state of boredom that marks those final steps out of the teenage years.

Cassavettes puts forth a solid if sometimes predictable performance with the songs following closely the verse-chorus format that has been the hallmark of AM and FM rock. “Lightning In A Bottle” hints at their live sound with it stretching out past the nine minute mark and featuring several tempo shifts. The halfway point sees the band step back, stretch, and relax into a languid swing that would fit just right under the stars on a humid August night. In contrast, “On Our Own”, one of those post high school graduation anthems, has the band nailing that multi-part vocal harmonies backed by a wheezy harmonica, and acoustic guitar. It is easy to slip into the foot stomping and remembering what it was like to dig under the car seats for just enough gas money to make it over the state line.

Overall, I found It’s Gonna Change to be a surprisingly fun piece of Roots-Rock confection. Nothing earth shattering, just solid music that for me had me reflecting on those summer days and nights just after high school when everything seemed possible and the struggles profound. You can read up on the band over at their website and stream some of the tracks from the album over at their Myspace page.