Reflection Eternal featuring Estelle “Midnight Hour”
If the first thing we had heard from Talib Kweli & Hi-Tek’s sophomore Reflection Eternal set Revolutions Per Minute was the slightly more radio-oriented Estelle collaboration “Midnight Hour”, we might have been a tad concerned that the much-praised duo’s comeback wasn’t going to be the deliciously underground-laced and thought-provoking lyric-focused affair we had been waiting a decade for. Hearing it after RE have already kept us entertained with a recent string of excellent pre-album leaks (“Back Again”, “In This World”, “Strangers (Paranoid)” and the HOT Jay Electronica, J. Cole & Mos Def-featured “Just Begun”) though, and we can better appreciate it’s more mainstream-leaning change of pace.
Centered around a reunion between lovers following Talib being on tour for months, “Midnight Hour” has the rapper and Estelle revving eachother up for the long-delayed sex-capades about to go down once he hits the door, as Hi-Tek cooks up a bouncy beat shuffle based around perkily chopped samples of The Shirelles’ 1961 classic “Mama Said”.
“He said ‘When you get home/ Unplug the phone/ The lights is off/ You know it’s on”, Kweli teases, while Estelle edges horny-fueled implosion awaiting his return, drawing on the blissful doo-wop harmonies of girl groups past to relate her inner-anticipation: “See I’ve been going crazy thinkin’ about you late night”.
Revolutions Per Minute drops in May. Pick up the duo’s The Re:Union mixtape here.
DL: “Midnight Hour” (alt)
BONUS DL: Reflection Eternal featuring Erykah Badu “The Blast (Remix)” (alt)
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