By Carl Begai

Woods 5: Grey Skies & Electric Light is arguably one of the strongest works in Woods Of Ypres frontman / founder David Gold’s catalogue of music. It’s certainly his most accessible album. Sadly, it also marks David’s final journey.

Killed in a car accident mere months before the official release, David never had the opportunity to enjoy the praise or consider the criticism of what is the most adventurous album of his career. And despite the accolades heaped to the sky, the simple truth is that not all diehard Woods Of Ypres fans will like it. Grey Skies & Electric Light is loaded with the doom and gloom they’ve come to expect, but the way it’s presented is much different from the revered Woods III and IV records. David’s clean voice dominates the new production over his death metal growls, the song arrangements don’t have the crushing density of its predecessors, and it’s loaded with brazen hooks big and small. Not what some expect of the blackened doom underground cornerstone of the genre. Current reactions indicate, however, that the majority of followers consider Woods 5 to be a masterpiece, and not merely as a show of respect for the fallen.

In an effort to showcase the new music, I spoke with Kittie vocalist / guitarist Morgan Lander, producer Siegfried Meier, and Woods Of Ypres guitarist Joel Violette, all of whom accompanied and worked with David during various stages of Grey Skies & Electric Light’s creation.

Siegfried Meier

Once the songs for Grey Skies & Electric Light had been taken as far as they could go in the demo stages, David followed up on Morgan’s link to Siegfried Meier. He and Joel Violette made their way to Beach Road Studios in Goderich, Ontario for a two week session of recording and related mayhem…

“I think it was early on into doing I’ve Failed You that Morgan told David about me,” Sig remembers. “He contacted me via email and checked out the stuff I’d done, and he actually scared me a bit at first (laughs). He was this larger than life figure, and when you got to know him you discovered he was a really nice, sweet guy. We communicated back and forth from April 2011 up until August, when they came in to do the record. Nothing was certain at that point, because they lost two members (Shane and Evan Madden) right before they came to the studio. It was just David and Joel, and I didn’t find out until the day before they arrived.”
“I have a band house here, so when bands come to the studio they live at the location, which is across the yard from the studio. So, beds are prepared and all that stuff. When they told me it was just the two of them, I thought ‘This is going to be easy…’ (laughs). It ended up being great, but it was difficult at the same time because when you’ve got four or five guys in a band, everyone keeps each other in check. When it’s two guys and me, or a solo artist and me, it’s always me against them or him. No matter how good I tell that person something is, he or she will be questioning it.”

Sig went back and did the necessary “research” on the Woods Of Ypres catalogue so he knew what he was getting himself into, but had no preconceived notions about the new material

“I’d heard all the older stuff, and David had been sending me the demos before they came to the studio. The thing is, those demos were a whole bunch of guitar tracks slapped together, no drums, maybe a click track playing, and no vocals. Those were the tunes (laughs). For me, that’s like the guitar player in a band holding the phone up to play me a song he just wrote, where I’m going ‘What the fuck? I can’t hear anything but noise!’ That’s kind of what the demos were like, but I noticed right away there was more catchiness to these tunes compared to the older ones. This was the first release for Earache, so David wanted to make sure he had the best songs he could possibly come up with.”
“I’m kinda sick of the whole Nickelback sound,” he adds, looking at it from the technical side of the production, “because there are 50 million guitar tracks and it’s one big wash. I want to hear the guitar and the tone of the amp. I did that with the I’ve Failed You record; it was tighter, less washy, and that’s what I was going for overall with the Woods 5 album.”

“We were working under extreme time constraints, with only two weeks to track the whole record, and one week of that were the drums because they always take the longest. That probably not the case with some of these newer bands, because they’re just programming drums in Pro-Tools and saying ‘This sounds so siiiiick!’ and it’s all fake. With real album I’ll never, ever program drums, and David was a great drummer. I prefer the sound of Slayer over Periphery any day (laughs). So, the second week was used to do guitars and vocals, and we had different stations set up so we could get everything done all at once. Recording the album was a bit of a blur, to be honest with you. It went so fast. The reason it’s relatively sparse has to do with the fact that we only had those two weeks. We did as much as we could in that duration of time, but I think what we did end up with in pretty damn impressive.”

Oddly enough, the one aspect of Woods 5 that made the biggest impact on Sig had nothing to do with the music.

“The record really blows me away lyrically. The day I found out what happened to David, all I could think about were the lyrics. I remember when I was finishing my first vocal comp – I don’t remember which track it was – and the lyrics were relatively depressing, about returning your body to the earth, your possessions, that sort of thing. Basically, it was David’s mindset in the last year, since he’d been teaching in Kuwait. I’ve never actually been so floored with lyrics on any record I’ve ever done. Pretty much every song was like that, and the lyrics really made me think. He was trying to answer the same questions that everyone has, especially in their late 20s and early 30s. I think he really hammered things home.”

Leading once again to discussion of ‘Adora Vivos’ and its ironic message:

“In that song he’s talking about Peter Steele (Type O Negative) and how everyone freaked out after he died, with everyone saying how great he was and how much they loved him. David just couldn’t understand that. He was like, ‘Why the fuck didn’t you adore him when he was here?’”

In closing, Sig reveals the one event during the recordings that’s guaranteed to keep David’s memory alive and well for him, namely the tornado that ripped through Goderich on Augut 21, 2011 and decimated a good portion of the town.

“The thunderstorm was quite significant to the Woods album,” he says. “It happened when we were in the middle of doing vocals. We saw the sky coming in, and we were working on ‘Lightning And Snow’ at the time. David was singing, it was getting really dark, and my lady was upstairs reading a book in the lounge. She happened to look out in the direction of town and thought she saw a tornado, but she didn’t say anything because there’s no way that kind of thing happens around here. We stopped recording and I shut down all the gear because insurance companies don’t cover you in the event of a lightning strike if your equipment gets fucked up. We took a break, and these fist-sized hailstones started coming down. David was freaking because we’d been working on ‘Lightning And Snow’, and we’ve got lightning, thunder and a hailstorm (laughs). It was so fucking weird. That tornado will forever remind me of David and the Woods 5 album. For me they’re completely intertwined.”

Check out the interviews with Morgan Lander and Joel Violette here.