(Our Sacramento-based writer DGR is the author of this Sunday’s edition of our series on metal from the past.)

Dismal Lapse were a Sacramento-based death metal band who were active for a brief period in the later 2000s, with their roots in an earlier Sacramento band known as Bled. During their time playing, the group would release one EP entitled The Nameless Faceless and then a 2009 album called Eon Fragmentation — which surprisingly enough this very site wrote a brief bit about long before they gave me the opportunity to set my roots down and burn this place to the ground.

Dismal Lapse played what should be a very familiar sound to a lot of our readers as they were a technical death metal band, although at the time that label hadn’t really homogenized around the sound that we currently associate with it. This fair city where I live would actually have a small hand in that though, alongside a swath of groups from the Bay Area who had been cutting their teeth for a long time on the I-5 touring run, when they were all picked up around the same time and divied up amongst labels like Unique Leader.

In 2009, that wasn’t really too much of a thought though, and Dismal Lapse were one amongst a handful playing a style that was intense and, yes, hyper-complicated. Continue reading »