Seeing Hudson Westbrook finally work up the courage to strut across the bar and spit game feels like a long-overdue moment. The 22-year-old spent much of his debut Texas Forever pining, filling the record with sad country songs that complemented the singer’s lovestruck delivery.
But the confidence he exudes on his second LP Made You Look is a sophomore surge, blowing in with a title track delivered with a wink and a smile. It comes across as theme music, the crashing chorus pulling in eyes and ears in time with the song’s signature tagline. It’s a chalk of Strait-isms, and fiddle fills that act as a wingman to Westbrook’s baritone laying down some one-liners.
Loverboy or ladies’ man? With a voice that can slide across steel fills and eyes tailor-made for swooning, the line starts to get blurred throughout the record. The singer seems comfortable in either position.
By now, Westbrook knows his scales and his marks as far as the down-the-middle country numbers go. “The Joker” contrasts his rough-and-tumble tendencies with the song’s subject, playing with the shuffle of matchmaking as if it were a deck of cards. Or take the Mayer-flavored introspection on “Nowhere Bound,” where the singer is headed to “destination: I don’t care.” It’s a line and a place you could imagine Johnson or McCollum ending up with the right writers to guide them there.
Westbrook has been positioned similarly to his Lone Star big brothers in terms of charm, but he hasn’t quite found the bite that drives many of his contemporaries until now. “I’ll find some sanity out there on the breeze,” he opines later in the track. Some of the most important moments on Made You Look are the ones where Westbrook is the sole subject.
And with a puffed chest and shoulders pulled back, he looks and acts like he belongs amongst the true country trailblazers. When he’s not in red dirt homeostasis, Westbrook is busy finding new ways to push his own limits and try out some new hats knowing his will still fit firmly when he grabs for it again.
“Love On The Line,” a swift road-rocker that’s got some alt-flecked reverb pulsing through its backbone. It’s Westbrooking, flooring the gas compared to everything that’s come before it, keeping his hands steady on the wheel from zero to sixty. “Thin Ice” puts some classic country turns of phrase in the icebox, where Westbrook uses bedroom-pop tricks to melt the clichés into a pool of straight sonic swagger.
Calling it experimental would be a stretch, but the singer knows what direction to nudge the reins in and acts as if the side trails are familiar territory. He’s fully aware of where to flex his biggest muscles.
Some of the more standard, southern-toned numbers on Made You Look are, like its predecessor, pretty placid. Westbrook can slide into a frictionless state, even getting a tad sleepy, when he’s back in his comfort zone.
From “Fienin’” all the way to closer “Texas Tear,” the engine starts to sputter a bit on the singer’s joyride toward the back end. Part of it is subject matter, but most of it feels like a general lack of enthusiasm.
As much charisma as he’s put on in the last year, it can only carry so much of the weight that a few filler tracks add to try and bulk up the project. The lowlights do, however, show off more of his calm and collected baritone, one that sounds assured as he slips into most any situation he throws himself into.
Made You Look does what so many follow-up records fail to do: improve on the solid foundation it’s built on. It’s no big secret that Westbrook can croon on heartbreak or flow through ballads behind batted eyes, but here he’s proving that those standards can be improved upon or even taken in a slightly new direction.
But whether his pickup lines are delivered between blues riffs or over the rhythm of a two-step, the confidence with which they’re delivered makes them unmistakably his regardless. Here, he soars when the material is as suave as he can be.
Hudson Westbrook may be far from a fully fledged superstar, but he’s starting to act like one, which is half the work anyway.
