Rob Crow is dipping his Pinback chocolate in Zach Hill's Hella peanut butter, and as these crossover-side-projects-containing-culty-stars fare, the Ladies' own-merit appeal falls into that moist pueblo between the Postal Service and Go Back Snowball, alongside Loose Fur-- which is a decent vantage point for sitting and wondering why Electronic stank so awfully. The great news is that the Ladies avoid "In the Fishtank" syndrome: While those hybrid experiments usually resulted in acts indulging each other's indulgent streaks to record geologically patient jam-bandy unsmooth jazz, guitarist Crow and drummer Hill tighten each other. Literally half of these tracks resemble traditional hummable songs, though they fitfully switch modes and are sequenced to bleed into the avant-something bits of subdued noise-punk, such as the Public Enemy nod "Black Metal in the Hour of Starbucks". (Wait, what is "subdued noise-punk" supposed to be? Mild chaos? Prog fusion? "Prusion"?) By now you've deducted that They Mean Us is hardly pop. Crow may have "O.C."-palatable pipes, but he chose the path less emo years ago, and Hill, um, he kind of can't be stopped. Your esteem for this release may well depend on your capacity to withstand Hill's virtuosity. If one were typing about this disc for The New Yorker or the Times, one couldn't be blamed for taking the sweeping time-capsule, pop-anthropology, Da Capo-anthology approach: What does it all mean that there exists in the marketplace a one-man rhyt