Sgt. Splendor is built from two artists who each had a full career before they ever teamed up. Kate Vargas built her name as a songwriter with a knack for vivid, unconventional Americana, while Eric McFadden has spent years bouncing between projects and collaborators, including stints with George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Angelo Moore, Anders Osborne, and Jackson Browne, among plenty of others. Despite crossing paths in the same scenes for years, the two didn’t officially connect until a songwriting festival in 2018, where things clicked fast enough that they were writing together almost immediately afterward.
Since then, the two have toured together, kept a livestream going through lockdown, and built up a real catalog as a duo, something that reads less like a side project for either of them and more like a genuine merger of two established artists into one act. The band’s identity leans hard into performance and spectacle too, their first tour was actually alongside a traveling circus, and that background still shapes how they present themselves visually and on stage.
Brave, Rough, and Ready to Go
Pulled from their album Isotopia and offered up as a preview of their upcoming fourth record, Electric Idol, due out October 16, “Brave, Rough, and Ready to Go” doesn’t play things straight. It plays out like a story with an old-fashioned frontier feel dropped into the present day, populated with over-the-top personalities and a mess brewing just underneath the surface fun. There’s real dark comedy running through it, but the song isn’t just there to entertain.
Underneath all the theatrics is a real question about who actually gets called brave and who’s left standing off to the side while it happens. The band has talked about writing it after noticing a pattern people seem stuck in, propping somebody up in the spotlight and then quietly enjoying it when that same person eventually stumbles. There’s a broader frustration in there too, aimed at how much weight gets put on standing out as one person instead of what a group can pull off by actually working as one.
Musically, it sits at the meeting point of grimy classic rock and something closer to storytelling theater, anchored by a bluesy guitar riff that pulls a little from John Lee Hooker’s playbook. Vargas’s vocal stays sharp and direct throughout, cutting cleanly through the arrangement, while the song’s final stretch hands things over to McFadden’s fingerpicked guitar work, which carries the track out on its own rather than fading into the background. It’s a genuine give-and-take between the two of them, each getting real room to lead.
The music video takes a different tone entirely, considerably more laid-back than the urgency of the song itself, set inside a recreation of San Francisco’s old Barbary Coast red-light district. It leans fully into the circus and burlesque world the band has built genuine ties to over the years, including a run with the Vau de Vire Society’s production “The Soiled Dove,” and the finished clip plays out like a chaotic, old-timey saloon overrun with acrobatics happening in every corner. That same production returns for its second season on August 7, this time also featuring a performance from Joan Baez.
Final Thoughts
“Brave, Rough, and Ready to Go” manages to be genuinely fun and genuinely pointed at the same time, and it’s a strong preview of what Sgt. Splendor has coming with Electric Idol this fall.
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