The Cardboard Nationals

The Cardboard Nationals is a four-piece independent rock band from Guelph, Ontario, formed in the early part of two-thousand and nine. Despite being pretty new on the scene, they’ve already received considerable buzz from the local insect community, due at least in part to the band’s rehearsal space acting as a hub of hipster silverfish, daddy long-leg and centipede sub-culture. Now on to the humans.

Out of the ashes of former local faves Beautiful Senseless, and after farting around overseas for a couple years, Farmer decided to document some of his newer material at home with some D.I.Y. recordings. This process followed a long, meandering trail, and eventually Farmer enlisted the services of Steve Hamilton, Andrew Coombes (also ex-Senseless members) and Kelly Steadman. The end result, very indy sounding and surprisingly raucous at times considering the folky spine of most of the songwriting, is a 7-song ep called ‘Sad Hips and HymnBooks’. It’s vibrant and gritty, and what it lacks in high-fi production value it makes up for in honest rendering.

And the name ‘The Cardboard Nationals’ came about like this: If you go to Buenos Aires, every night you’ll see this army of homeless people scouring through garbage cans on the street, collecting materials to take to recycling plants on the outskirts of the city for a few pesos. They are called 'carteneros'--people of the cardboard. When the city sleeps, this shadowy wave of toil and survival washes silently through the streets.