Honey Radar - Sing the Snow Away: The Chunklet Years (2020)

A collection of catchy, lo-fi 7"s on Athens’ Chunklet shows off the Philadelphia musician Jason Henn’s bedroom-pop prowess and surreal, often funny songwriting.

Jason Henn makes hooks. In the 14 years since he started Honey Radar, the group’s only constant—besides Henn himself—has been catchy tunes. He has a seemingly unlimited ability to spin an ear-worming riff, add a simple beat, and sing some clever phrases along with it. Those kinds of skills should make Honey Radar work best as a singles act: Grab any two tracks from their catalog and you’ve got a ready-made 45 that would sound great in any diner’s jukebox.

But Honey Radar albums and EPs sound pretty great too. Like prolific songwriters Billy Childish and Robert Pollard, Henn is so creative that his tunes grab you no matter how many you hear, or in what order. Sing the Snow Away, a sparkling compilation of the 7" records Honey Radar made for Athens, Georgia, label Chunklet, is as cohesive and addictive as any of the group’s three full-length LPs. It might even be better: Henn has given Chunklet some of his most memorable material, and hearing all of it together adds extra adrenaline.

What makes the songs on Sing the Snow Away memorable is Henn’s knack for creating a classic, where-have-I-heard-this-before aura while adding idiosyncratic accents. He’s well versed in rock history: He got his first record, a Monkees album, when he was five, and his parents steered him strongly toward the Beatles (in order to keep him away from the Rolling Stones). All of those groups echo in Henn’s curved guitar lines—one of the album’s best cuts, “Telephone Betty’s Aneurysm,” sounds torn straight from Revolver—as do contemporaries such as Sic Alps and Ty Segall. Henn isn’t afraid of his influences: He covers the Monkees on Sing the Snow Away, and his peculiar choice—an obscure tune heard only on a 1969 TV special—shows the depth of his fandom.