The skinny:
Dayton, Ohio’s Robert Pollard, the man known best for writing more songs and drinking more Rolling Rock than anyone on the planet is at it again. With his umpteenth release (“umpteenth” is Ohioan for “a lot”), the frontman for the soon-to-be defunct Guided by Voices has spent the last eight years releasing tons of side projects under various band names (Circus Devils, Lifeguards, Airport 5, Go Back Snowball, Howling Wolf Orchestra) in addition to the GBV releases. Fiction Man is full of Pollard’s trademark pop ditties that stick in your head and keep your toes tappin’ all night long. Then again, our toes are always tappin’. (We’ve got Parkinson’s!)

If you liked this album, you’d like:
Guided by Voices, Yo La Tengo, the Wrens, the Strokes, Broken Social Scene.

Top five “fiction men” we wish we could be:
1. Harry Callahan from the Dirty Harry movies
2. Conan from Conan the Barbarian
3. Superman from the Superman comics
4. Mongomery Burns from The Simpsons
5. Katie Couric from The Today Show

Did we listen to this?
We listened before we wrote this review, while writing it, and after we wrote it.

Tantalizing tidbits:
Robert Pollard once threw a no-hitter as a high school pitcher. We drank a bunch of pitchers once. Uhhhh…that’s almost the same thing, right? Stop looking at us like that.