¡Viva Nueva! by Rustic Overtones

¡Viva Nueva!, the fourth album from Maine's Rustic Overtones, finally escaped in 2001 on Tommy Boy, and the story of how it got there is half the legend. The band had cut what was reputed to be a million-dollar record for Arista, with Tony Visconti credited as producer, then played a live set so ferociously heavy that the label balked; one Arista rep supposedly griped that they'd been expecting another Dave Matthews Band. The band insisted they'd promised nothing of the kind, and Arista let them walk off with the record.

At 16 tracks it's the most crowded album they've made, a big, restless sprawl with "C'Mon" out front. It couldn't save them: a very public breakup followed a year later. In December 2009 the Portland Phoenix named it the tenth-best local album of the decade and hailed it as the first true big-league rock record to come out of Maine.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.