TOUCH COMMITTEE
The Bike Kitchen
Oct, 20, 2007
   
Touch Committee introduced me to San Francisco’s cycle-gang headquarters, The Bike Kitchen, located in SOMA: “And over here are the Italian handlebars...”

No, not literally, naive reader!

I got to know the place via the band’s beautiful cocktail of post-post-post-hardcore music, which I really thought was going to send the bikes hanging from the ceiling crashing down on our heads. Cuz Touch Committee was loud. And had the raining-bikes-scenario become reality, they would probably have just kept playing. 

It was an informal scene. People brought their own beer, the cover (was there a cover?) was not exactly enforced, the band brought their own beat-to-Hades P.A. system, and singer/guitarist Seth Miller offered the crowd “sweaty hugs” if they bought the band’s new EP, That Bear Record.

Touch Committee’s  performance was similarly laissez-faire, excepting their sound, which was tightly spun and intense. Drummer Jerry Andersen was a fucking tyrant on the drums, beating his kit a yard across the concrete floor until someone brought the guy a carpet. Bass lines pulsed from a speaker cabinet at least 5 feet tall. The guitars wove a spangled tapestry of off-kilter chime, only to explode with distortion.

Miller’s confessed collection of Boilermaker 7-inches could explain Touch Committee’s driving, melancholic feel, but they remind me more of a burning Mercedes, doing 70 mph, with Sonic Youth on the stereo: Elegant interior melodies sullied by art-noise, beauty gleaming through the incendiary chaos, cruising at high speed.
 
Set this between 4 concrete walls, a mess of bike parts, and you have one bizarre metaphor . . . but a great show.

[Nathan Ladd]

[STREAM] Touch Committee: Various Tracks