If I'm looking to examine an album's music, I'll usually just pick up the guitar and play along from how I remember the songs, and then see what my fingers are doing on the fretboard. If there isn't a guitar to hand (rare, but happens from time to time), I have to do this mentally. However, rather than doing any kind of visualisation (of tablature, a fretboard, or anything), I tend to imagine the feeling of playing along, working out how my fingers would move to reproduce those notes. The more I get used to the guitar, the easier this becomes.
I find it interesting that you would do this mental tabbing before trying to play the song on the guitar (and that one might not remember the entirety of a song) - do you learn the notes that are being played in a song individually, or do you learn how the song as a whole sounds? Instinctively, I do the latter, to the effect that I have a very large library of music in my head, which I can dredge up at will (in fact, if there isn't music playing in the room/nearby [again, a rarity], I'll fill the empty sound spaces with music from my mind).
-It allows you to see further into the DNA of bands, genres, and possibly time periods by revealing predominant intervals and recurrent patterns
This, most definitely. All of the really good Extreme Metal bands are pretty unique in their preferred modes, speeds, and types of riff. Learning a bunch of a band's songs is a massive gateway into understanding how their music is linked together.