Well, it finally happened – Growing Aside, the star-studded and highly anticipated math rock documentary produces and written by Juan Godfrid, has been released. It features a ton of cool cameos from bands like Don Caballero, Toe, TTNG, Elephant Gym, Covet, Standards, Delta Sleep, and more, and you even get a good amount of face time in with Fecking Bahamas founder, Nicholas Hunter!
Beyond the familiar names and faces, Growing Aside itself has a really high production level too, which is enormously great to see because most of the time if you’re looking for a video or a documentary on math rock, it gets gimmicky pretty fast. If it were just the production, that would be one thing, but it’s the passion and care the production highlights that make the results so great.
Sit your butts down and check it out below:
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There are lots of great little clips, each one of them worth considering and how they add up to an incredibly diverse yet unified take on math rock as a whole. Is it a genre? A descriptor? An insult? It seems a little bit like all of the above, and yet, here we all are. In fact, we’d say interest in seeing this particular documentary completed has only grown in the six years after being announced in 2019.
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There are lots of great clips with all of the folks mentioned above and more, but one of the recorded conversations that made impact with us immediately was Ian Williams on the times surrounding Don Cab’s third record, where Ian and Damon Che’s other bands, being Speaking Canaries, and Storm and Stress, started to brew up tensions in the interim created by Don Cab’s second guitar player moving to another city. We’ve been there, man.
Williams explains that Che wasn’t originally keen on odd time signatures and that he’d had a hard time gelling during their second album, with Che even going so far as to dedicate Speaking Canaries’ record to ‘the glorious 4/4 time signature.’ It sounds menacing, but Storm and Stress carved an equally bull-headed path in their decimation of meter altogether.
In the end, there’s just something so brotherly and familiar about their relationship when they’re talking about their distinct grievances, yet always nudging each other forward. It’s charming enough as it is, but it also helps highlight that math rock as a genre, has always been growing, never giving in to one simple explanation. Like Elephant Gym point out early on in the doc, it’s a genre that’s still growing, and you know what they say – it takes a village. But all things considered, it seems math rock’s village is the world itself, and Growing Aside does a great job showing it off.
Well done, everyone.
Credits:
Produced and Directed by Juan Godfrid
Presented by Anomalía Ediciones
Filmed by Leonard Bazán
Edited by Nacho Tomé
Narrated by Sean Carney
Music by Ezequiel Gaspar
Executive Production by Thomas James McMaster, Sebastian Pratesi, and Seby X. Martinez
Associate Production by Kyle T. Strand, Simeon Bartholomew, and Nacho Tomé
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