The ascendant buzz of Toronto singer Ramriddlz is a testament to the enduring magnetism of his city's current chief cultural ambassador, Drake. In a little over a year, Ram went from total obscurity as a graphic design student to consultation with Drake's manager and OVO Sound co-founder Oliver El-Khatib, thanks to "Sweeterman," a horned-up jingle about convincing a girl to smoke weed with him. The song is a summer breeze, comforting waves of keys ebbing and cresting as Ram mumbles clumsy come-ons through a thicket of AutoTune. Drake, ever the eagle-eyed revisionist, scrubbed the teenage-pothead chaff off the lyric sheet and presented "Sweeterman" as a straightforward bedroom jam for the inaugural edition of his Beats 1 OVO Sound Radio show. Ramriddlz soldiered on without his signature song, releasing a marginally well-received EP called P2P —"Pussy Too Pink," natch—to capitalize on the sudden windfall of media attention.

Ramriddlz has returned this month with a new nine-song project called Venis, and like P2P, which arrived with a suggestively vaginal kaleidoscope of a rose as artwork, the cover art here—a digital rendering of a juicy peach in water—relays exactly where this kid's head is. Venis is full of gooey bedroom talk, delivered in an affected patois that combines humid dancehall temptation and plaintive Toronto sound malaise. In capable hands, this is a platinum combination, but Ramriddlz is hammy, amateurish, and touristic in his approach. His lines are forced and leaden. In "Play" alone, there are three clunkers that rank among the year's worst. ("You said I'm cheesy and you lactose," "Let's get wavy by the ocean," "I'm rolling and I'm getting stoned / Baby I'm a rolling stoner.") Another song called "Baeby" actually petitions for oral sex with a withering "Hakuna matata."

Venis displays all the poise of a nerdy kid brother learning how not to speak to women one spectacular embarrassment at a time, but just as exasperating as the lyrics, which are somehow even more bantamweight than "Sweeterman," is Ram's shaky grasp on melody. On the low end, he employs a soothing Drake-ish croon, the same one being run into obsolescence by scores of adopters around Toronto and beyond. It's Venis' saving grace on highlights "Left, Right" and "Bodmon," cuts where the singer leans back as his producers carry him to the hooks. But these peaks are too often offset by the shrill bleat at the other end of his register, a grating wobbly tone processed within an inch of humanity by pitch-correcting software, one assumes, because Ram can't quite nail the actual notes. When he sails up an octave in the second verse of the single "Hey Mr. RamRod" to ask a girl to let him in the "kitty kat," it sounds like he's trying to strangle one instead.

Ramriddlz doesn't bring much to Venis that any number of other singers couldn't, provided the right strains of bud and shamelessness. The real treat, then, is the music tasked with washing out his voice, shared between "Sweeterman" maestro Jaegen, Hoodie Allen collaborator RJF, and 1Mind. Together, they bring a respect for the architecture of modern dancehall that their singer can't quite hack. Where these songs float, it is because of the ultralight sonics underfoot, not the unsure fake patois over top. 1Mind's soaring "Baeby" airlifts Ram by way of a pulsating groove not even a string of bad puns and fake Jadakiss ad libs can quell. "Venis" pulls a dizzying hard left into downcast house in its last minute as the singer prattles on, Auto Tune so thick he may as well be another synth in the mix. Really, this is a producer's project.

How much this music successfully entertains is directly rooted in how easily the center attraction can be tuned out, because on Venis, Ramriddlz's shtick wears gratingly thin. Though there are moments when he locks into his production and fires off easy hooks and turns of phrase, a numbingly foolish lyric pops up every couple lines. The aim is slackness, the more adroitly sexual end of the dancehall spectrum, but by and large, this stuff isn't sexy, unless Ram's promise of semen that tastes like Chick-fil-A Polynesian sauce sounds like a good time. If Ramriddlz is going to last beyond the quick, bright heat of a choice Drake cosign, it'll be by honing songwriting smarts to match the lush production he lucked into. Venis volleys between the vapid and the bizarre in search of the absurdist magic of "Sweeterman," when what was really needed was refinement.