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...Dillinger Escape Plan (TDEP) aren’t suffering from a florid case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, they’re certainly playing the part well. Take “Farewell, Mona Lisa,” the lead single off the band’s fourth album, “Option Paralysis:” just as the song’s grindcore rendition of dial-up modem noise grows exhausting, the band breaks into a cascade of eerie acoustic guitar arpeggios. Then, after about 50 seconds of tranquility, they unleash a blinding squall of guitar riffage, while vocalist...
Fortunately, the album’s intelligent track sequencing trivializes this would-be flaw. The record opens with the aforementioned “Farewell, Mona Lisa,” which clearly demonstrates the multiple styles TDEP have at their command. As the album continues, shorter, noisier songs are interspersed between their more melodic counterparts. For instance, after two particularly aggressive numbers, the band lines up the album’s centerpiece, a mathcore-lounge tune called “Widower.” The song begins with some jazzy piano playing that grows muddier as Puciato’s vocals...
Writing not long after the death of Leonardo da Vinci, art historian and biographer Giorgio Vasari described the late master’s “Mona Lisa,” placing special emphasis on the lady’s uncanny simper. “And in this work of Leonardo’s there was a smile so pleasing, that it was a thing more divine than human to behold; and it was held to be something marvelous, since the reality was not more alive,” he wrote. The sublime expression of “La Joconde?...
Enter Dr. Margaret S. Livingstone, Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, whose research focuses on human visual perception. Livingstone realized that while contemporary art historians like Ernst Gombrich are not wrong in their analysis of “Mona Lisa,” there’s a science to da Vinci’s masterpiece that had yet to be fully explained. Analyzing the work in terms of its spatial frequencies, Livingstone revealed that the lower spatial frequencies, best seen by the peripheral vision, make the figure appear to smile, while at higher frequencies the smile almost vanishes...
Touching again on the methodological, Fehrenbach recalls Margaret Livingstone’s explanation of Mona Lisa’s smile. “Now someone is giving us a scientific explanation for it, and there are a few ways that you can respond to it. First of all, you can say great, finally that has been explained by scientific fact. Or you can say, well does that mean, since I do not agree with the floating emotion in the Mona Lisa, does that mean that my neurologic apparatus is not okay? … I would simply say that...