Like the class moron who turns out to be developmentally disabled, Ben Lee's no fun to pick on anymore. A vengeful, hype-smiting deity has already rained down the toughest punches: rejection both by the majors and ex-girlfriend Claire Danes, best days past at 26, bottom billing in quasi-supergroup the Bens (and don't tell me it was alphabetical). On Awake Is the New Sleep, the former wunderkind decides the best way to exorcise his post-Danes demons is more syrupy, anonymous light pop.
Lee's "album about waking up" is as refreshing as a decades-old Nike slogan. "Just do it, whatever it is," the young Aussie advises amid the repetitive finger-picking of opener "Whatever It Is". On "We're All in This Together", he philosophizes 20-plus times that we're all just that ("yeah!"), so "open your heart" and let the "Hey Jude" coda in. "The Debt Collectors" shoots for Up-era R.E.M., Lee's vocals breaking with tender emotion over rhymes like "We can make a deal, everything is real" and similes stolen from Built to Spill album titles. Vapid is the new deep!
Mostly, Lee really really misses his girlfriend. He aches for her in "Ache for You", feels far away on "Close I've Come", gets spurned by would-be rebounds on "Get Gotten". The "Roxanne" rocksteady of Australian single "Gamble Everything for Love" is at least bearable, but its "you can go your own way" lyric makes Lee's Fleetwood Mac-pillaging on "No Right Angles" that much more obvious ("Dreams", bitches!). Let the healing start with soft-rocker "Begin", which could be this year's "Cigarettes Will Kill You" if it ever rose above seventh-grade poetry: "It's OK for you to care, 'cause I can feel you in the air." Dumb is the new sensitive!
Like a washed-up athlete, Lee's stuck reliving his glory years. Perky U.S. radio hit "Catch My Disease" proudly (and ironically) brandishes the obsolete badge of 90s indiedom: "They don't play me on the radio/ And that's the way I like it." Lee big ups Good Charlotte, too, and revisits lyrical coup "open your heart,"-- this time as a chorus. Fellow 90s phenom Brad Wood produces, vainly drenching the lackluster songwriting in the dentist's-office electronica of Lee's 1999 Breathing Tornadoes-- which "Into the Dark" name-checks in the most pathetic self-allusion you'll hopefully never hear. The new Ben Lee is the old Ben Lee is every LSAT-flunking strummer in the fraternity of your choice-- and cute, too!
