Join Bell's Brewery at Spotty Dog on Thursday, April 11th from 5-8 for the launch of their new hazy IPA: Official along with the first Oberon of the season. Score some giveaways from the brewery and raise a glass to the arrival of Spring! * Official * Two of our favorite ingredients come together in the brewhouse; pungent American hops and delicious wheat malt. This Hazy IPA is double dry-hopped (a combination of Mosaic, Citra, Azacca, Amarillo and El Dorado hops) resulting in complex peach, stone fruit and tropical notes with a dry finish and balanced bitterness. A refined beer for those who love hops and for those who prefer wheat beers. Go ahead and make it Official.

Johanna Warren sometimes seems like a psychic medium moonlighting as a songwriter. The Portland native makes dreamy folk music that sparkles and sprawls with new age flourishes and crystal shop percussion, inspired by tarot cards, metaphysics, and the monastic teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh. Even beyond her recorded work, Warren comes off like a person radiating with cosmic wisdom to the point that it starts leaking outward, seemingly unprompted. In an interview at SXSW last year, she offered this advice: “If you just make yourself really bright and shiny, everything around you becomes a reflective surface that shines back at you.” (The question she’s responding to—“How’s your South By experience so far?”). Gemini II is the second album Johanna Warren has composed about a relationship (with a Gemini), and it mirrors its predecessor. Both feature nine interlinked songs, with Warren playing a wide variety of instruments including guitar, flute, mellotron, and synths. While the concept views love through an astrological lens, her lyrics expose life’s crushing banality—the things that make us look to the stars for answers in the first place. In “Cause or Effect,” she sings to a protagonist left bored and self-conscious when everyone at the party steps out for a smoke. “You got nothing else to do/Your phone is broken,” she sings as a rush of harmony enters, as if to mock the weight of such unglamorous ennui. While recording prolifically as a solo artist, Warren has also developed a career accompanying folks like Julie Byrne and Iron & Wine, acts who’ve gained notoriety for just how unaccompanied their music sounds. You get the sense that Warren’s become a sought-after collaborator not for her ability to blend into the background but for her knowledge of exactly how to complement a song while maintaining its sense of solitude, tapping into an inherent aura. This skill makes the relatively brief Gemini II feel dynamic and sweeping and its songs consistently surprising. In the moody opener, “Hopelessness Has Done Nothing For Me,” Warren textures a date night pep talk with gothic cobwebs of piano and guitar. When the drums kick in, they conjure the rush of road-trip indie rock, a subtle gust of familiarity and momentum. More straightforward songs like the strum-along ballad “Boundaries” also move in strange ways. With a melody that finds the middle ground between Red House Painters’ Songs for a Blue Guitar and Taylor Swift’s Speak Now, Warren breaks in and out of character, injecting its sense of calm with conversational asides. You are unlikely to hear a more beautiful song that also includes the phrase, “so fucking stoked.” Both as a guitarist and a vocalist, Warren has a knack for complex, unwinding melodies. The subtle “Mine to Take,” with its weary double-tracked vocals, taps into the mystical Laurel Canyon sound of Judee Sill. British folk serves as an inspiration for the more ambitious compositions: the hypnotic “inreverse” and the closing “Was It Heaven.” Wise and stately, these songs provide the album’s major moments of resolution. “I hope you’ll fly again,” Warren sings in the closing lines of “Was It Heaven.” “With you, I was infinitely lost.” As the departing sentiment of her Gemini saga, it offers a sense of peace, but Warren knows most journeys don’t end so clean. We never stop searching for answers: It’s what keeps all our most trusted songwriters—and psychics—in business. -- Sam Sodomsky, Pitchfork

Volume is a FREE reading & music series featuring prose, poetry and a short DJ set. Every second Saturday at 7:00 pm at The Spotty Dog. Books are available for purchase and signing. This month's writers include: MARIANNE SHANEEN is a Lebanese/Mexican-American writer who’s been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and a NYSCA grant. Her work has appeared in Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, Manchester University Press, Vanitas, and elsewhere. She’s currently finishing her first novel, Homing. TESS BROWN-LAVOIE writes and farms in Providence, RI. She is author of Lite Year, winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series. Tess co-founded Sidewalk Ends Farm in 2011, and is President of the National Young Farmers Coalition. PATRICK DONNELLY is the author of four books of poetry: Little-Known Operas, Jesus Said, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, and The Charge. He directs the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place, Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, NH, now a center for poetry and the arts. YZ CHIN is the author of Though I Get Home, premier winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared or will appear in Harvard Review, Electric Literature, and more. Followed by a DJ set from Stephen Bluhm

Brooklyn-based Girls on Grass, despite their moniker, is precisely 50% girl—Barbara (writer, singer, guitarist), drummer Nancy Polstein (the Friggs, Cheri Knight, Star City)—and 50% boy: blues/alt-country vet David Weiss on lead guitar(replacing Sean Eden), and WFMU’s own Dave Mandl on bass. Upon her arrival in NYC in 2004, Barbara served time in a handful of bands; it took a decade for her songwriting identity to blossom, and when it did, it contained multitudes: not only her Wisconsin working-class folk-country sensibility, but all the strains she took in as a kid andas a working musician. Think very, very melodic roots-y but also psych-inflected bands: the dBs, the Rain Parade, plus a big dose of surf and rockabilly. Plus, just warm as heck. But that’s not all: she’s sort of a guitar hero. Think Dickey-Betts-meets-Tom-Verlaine. Precisely executed, angular lines, played left-handed. But that’s not all, either, because this is really a band, one that, upon their 2014 live debut (at Freddy’s Back Room) seems to have become the favorite of an alarming number of people. On Barbara’s left is Dave #1: the Tele guy who can effortlessly channel the likes of Roy Buchanan, Clarence White, or Richard Thompson as he plays in deft counterpoint to Barbara’s guitar. On her right is Dave #2, the melodic-but-grooving bass guy, who seems to always come up with the perfect but completely unexpected part. And behind her, holding everything together is Nancy, a drummer who really knows how to support a song, but can unleash a Bonham-esquestadium fill when such a thing is called for. Dirty Power, their about-to-be-released sophomore effort,is a stunning collection that continues Barbara’s lay-it-on-the-lineapproach to songcraft but ups the ante musically witha more-developedguitar interplay that’s equal partsSticky FingersandMarqueeMoon.Girls on Grass recorded Dirty Powerwith producer Eric Ambel (alum of Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, Del-Lords, Blood Oranges)and engineer Mario Viele, with mixing by Michael James. __ House of Kin weaves words from the heart into dynamic vocal melodies and harmonies that shake the soul into the present moment. Live looped vocals, piano, bass and percussion create a soulful pop sound and a story of redemption. With ethereal incantations, humor, and raw truth, Jess Kin and Michael Lesko offer their dreams of what could be with a personal mission to live in gratitude and treat all life as kin. Each song is a prayer and a testament to the lessons learned from the darkness.”

Matt (MV) Valentine's music blends aspects of the cosmic, the ancient, and the prosaic to create a sonic homebrew of purely distilled rural psychedelia. Multilayered guitar textures and off-the-cuff lyrical profundity exist side by side in MV's songs, they'll get you one way or the other. He's released many records as a member of renowned bands MV/EE and Tower Recordings, and has recently been playing and releasing material with Pat (PG Six) Gubler as Wet Tuna. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7xstWcgGiA https://mvandee.bandcamp.com https://mvandee.blogspot.com sky furrows Fronted by poet Karen Schoemer, Albany's Sky Furrows combine various influences ranging from krautrock, NZ bands like the Clean and the Verlaines, the Minutemen, and early Sonic Youth. Burnt Hills vets Phil Donnelly (drums), Eric Hardiman (bass), and Mike Griffin (guitar) provide stark and propulsive backdrops to Schoemer's evocative poetry. bulle Bulle are a side project of Wednesday Knudsen and Clark Griffin from Pigeons and Weeping Bong Band. Past performances have featured synth, guitar, and saxophone, and they've often collaborated with other musicians in the live setting.