Because I’ve seen enough variations of it over the years, I’d venture to guess that the compliment most often paid to the rapper and producer Missy Elliott is that she sounded, and continues to sound, like the future. Her show at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena on Saturday — the second stop on her Out of This World tour (the first she’s headlining, if you can believe it, and for reasons no more complicated than “it felt right”) — was an exhilarating testament to why the sentiment has endured, even if she hasn’t released an album’s worth of material since 2005’s The Cookbook.
Her sonic trademarks — a predilection for onomatopoeia, basses that belch, and beats that tend to swerve and skitter — were slightly muddied by the arena’s cavernous acoustics. But it didn’t deter the relentless thrills of a show that almost exclusively ran through Elliott’s greatest hits. (Exceptions were found in the handful of well-timed songs from her 2019 comeback EP “Iconology,” which was disappointing on its own for its unusually-for-Elliott looking-backward ethos but which worked well in the context of a tour happy to revel in the pleasures of the past.)
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Peterson Reviews 