Soft Peaks & ORSULAK Guitarist Eben Dennis Returns with New Remotely-recorded EP's from Baltimore-based Bands Plague Saints & Blue Blockers

If The Witzard mainstay John "Jumbled" Bachman is truly "somewhere between Madlib & Mike Watt," does that mean Eben Dennis is the James Williamson to his Mike Watt? For those unfamiliar with this head-scratching "analogy," Mike Watt & James Williamson appeared together within the 2000's reunited iteration of Iggy Pop-helmed The Stooges; Williamson played guitar with Iggy from 1970-71, 1972-74, and 2009-13, while Watt joined between 2003-13 playing bass across Stooges "reunion" albums The Weirdness (2007) and Ready to Die (2013.) Thus, we've been familiar with Eben Dennis' musical output just as long as we've been writing about Jumbled. In fact, Dennis provided additional guitar riffs to Berko Lover-assisted "Sam Adams" from our very first introduction to Jumbled, 2016's [I wish it was longer] or WIWL.


We've since covered John Bachman & Eben Dennis' work together as part of Baltimore-based Indie Rock/Pop band Soft Peaks. Initially formed back in 2013, Soft Peaks have recorded a cover of The Kinks' festive favorite, "Father Christmas," released two EP's, s/t and Altocumular, throughout 2014, and most recently, December Boys in September 2016. Earlier this year, reunited once more on-record and "hit it outta the park" with their beat-minded vaguely baseball-themed ORSULAK EP. Supposedly, somewhere in-between Soft Peaks & ORSULAK, Bachman & Dennis worked together on "a track for a Twin Peaks tribute album." It appears as though ORSULAK was, actually, birthed around Summer 2018 when Jumbled was approached about creating a film noir-style song for use in a film.


John Bachman immediately reached out to his friend, old bandmate, and guitarist Eben Dennis and even though said film was never released, it inadvertently helped kick-start ORSULAK. So, all of that was a very long-winded way of saying... we randomly received a cold-sent email from Eben Dennis late last night. Dennis expalined, since we wrote about both ORSULAK & Soft Peaks in the past, he wanted to share a new project called Plague Saints he very recently finished up with a couple friends. "We recorded it remotely in three Baltimore basements over the past six months. It's sorta somewhere between [The] Jesus & Mary Chain and Roxy Music?" Eben Dennis further detailed. Plague Saints' debut EP, Only Devotion, was written by vocalist, guitarist, and drummer Jonathan Moore and Dennis, who provided vocals, guitars, and keys.


Eben Dennis, Jonathan Moore & Mark Wingfield previosuly recorded music together as part of Soft Peaks, as well as a mid-2000's band called health hailing from North Carolina. More recently, and prior to forming Plague Saints, Moore & Dennis re-connected and started figuring out their remote recording set-up by way of Blue Blockers, who released a collection of five covers entitled diesel thieves. It includes spirited covers of Roxy Music, Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, The Magnetic Fields, and The Grateful Dead. Below, you'll find a slightly more length breakdown about how both Blue Blockers' diesel thieves and Plague Saints' Only Devotion were recorded from Eben Dennis himself. Plus, we recently heard from a little Baltimore Oriole Jumbled & Eben Scott have begun working on ORSULAK 2, as well. Plague Saints' Only Devotion EP is now available to stream/download on Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify, and like-minded platforms.

The process for the Plague Saints EP was really born out of the conditions of The Pandemic. The three of us have played together for a long time, but have never done a remote collaboration. Basically, Jonathan Moore or myself would write and record the skeleton of a song, then, pass the file to each other to add more guitars, keys, etc. Then, Mark Wingfield would tie it together with the bass. Jonathan wrote "Season Bugs," "You Always Call [When I'm Not Around]," "Key Bridge," and "I Want To." I wrote "Stop Being In Love," "Only to Oceans," and "Disbelieving." We both played all sorts of guitars and sang. In addition to that, Jonathan did all the drumming, I did all the keyboards, and Mark did the bass. This is, generally, lo-fi in that we used GarageBand—not really "professional" software.

That said, we didn't use a lot of the software effects. Most of the instruments are mic'ed, though, I ran direct with some guitars while my kids were sleeping. Since we have all been playing together for so long, we have a general idea of a sound we are going for: a little loose with imperfections and allow for happy accidents. I guess, that's what I mean by "lo-fi" (because there are many layers on most of these.) We use GarageBand as a template and try to get a good tone going in. We use the software for panning and EQ'ing, generally, to got the sound we wanted—the sonic stuff. We did all the mixing and mastering. Though, the songs vary a lot (from Power Pop, Chamber Pop to straight Rock) there is a general vibe that holds it together... hopefully. Sorry to be long-winded—we really dig the process."

- Eben Dennis (@ebenscottdennis)