Ripe is the first Australian album with a track carrying the inadvertent warning, “feat Mandy Moore.” It’s the signal of international ambitions. The recent traces of flaccid self-help hippiedom remain in a few couplets, but mostly Lee sounds triumphantly primed for the US radio market. He lets Clear Channel know his endearing outsider status in a few titles: ‘American Television’ and ‘What Would Jay-Z Do?’ (and potentially the Bon Jovi-styled ‘Sex Without Love’).

Practically every song here seems readymade to soundtrack ‘key scenes’ in the next Zach Braff flick. And a couple of them – namely ‘Is This How Love’s Supposed to Feel?’ – would slide easily into the line-up of mawkish power-ballad rock that fills space between ads on commercial radio, which means the album’s paid for itself in future royalties and licensing fees. But what about the songs and the album, the product his fans are buying? Bland for the most part, radio-buffed within an inch of humanity. ‘Blush’, for instance, rides a relaxed groove and carries a hooky chorus, but it is a passable indie-pop song jacked up to soar on a CD of compressed radio fodder.

Lee, it’s worth remembering, was plucked from the Sydney suburbs as a precocious cute kid, all gangly limbs and ebullient enthusiasm. Behind the gloss, his songs still retain that Grandpaw Would mixture of nerdy awkwardness and cocksure certainty. Only now that eccentricity seems like so much cultivated semi-celebrity excess; the album too is an extension of the stage-managed unpredictability, lacking spark and spontaneity in the name of the freewheeling image.

by Ben Gook