If you don't have one handy, here are the facts: On May 3, 1886, one person was killed and several others injured as police intervened to protect picket-line crossers from strikers during a work stoppage at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. The strike itself was part of a campaign by militant labor unionists in Chicago and elsewhere to secure an eight-hour workday, a bold demand in the days when the very notion of a union was thought to be illegal. The next day, a mass meeting was held in Haymarket Square in Chicago to protest police brutality. During the meeting, an unknown figure hurled a bomb into the crowd. The bomb killed seven policemen and injured a score of others, and eight of the anarchist labor leaders were convicted of murder on the grounds that they had conspired with or aided an unknown murderer, though a connection was not demonstrated.
Fast forward more than 100 years to present-day Chicago and indie-rock outfit Haymarket Riot. (As a side note, Haymarket Riot is also the name of a late 1960s psychedelic rock band from suburban Detroit, and an active group from San Francisco that makes Web-based audio/visual productions). With members from defunct Chicago indie-rock bands Tremula and Gauge, Haymarket Riot sounds like a lot of other bands from the fertile Midwest indie/emo scenes, including the most semifamous one, Braid.
Braid, now a memory itself, typified a scene that took a big page from the early post-punk Dischord Records catalog, especially that of Fugazi. What Haymarket Riot's two releases--a debut self-titled album and an EP titled Wax on Chicago-based Divot Records--show is that some degree of success can be attained by following a template very closely. The template in this case: heavy bass lines, precise drumming, stop-start rhythms, and lyrics about the self's role within the greater community and with the people one deals with on a daily basis. Haymarket Riot certainly follows the formula well enough to have a forthcoming album released by weighty punk-rock label Thick Records, the former home of the Blue Meanies. Though it is very unlikely Haymarket Riot will catalyze any labor unrest when it rolls through Rubber Gloves, it probably will entertain the scene-savvy Denton crowd who will know exactly what "they're from Chicago" means.
