Who Charted?: Incubus Takes Top Spot, Jay Takes A Tumble

We had a hunch that nu-metal survivors Incubus would have a solid debut this week, but we honestly didn’t think their album would slide into the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200. But hey, there’s Light Grenades, their fifth album, sitting pretty in the chart’s top spot, with 165,000 copies sold. That’s about half the first-week total of the band’s last album, 2004’s A Crow Left Of The Murder, but maybe once people actually hear that Incubus has a new record out, they’ll head to the shops.

Biggest Debuts: With last week’s light release schedule, the only other debuts of note came from Clipse, whose Hell Hath No Fury sold 78,000 copies and landed at No. 14, and the Ying Yang Twins, who sold 36,000 copies of Chemically Imbalanced to enter the charts at No. 40.

Biggest Slides: Kingdom Come by Jay-Z took an 80% sales hit, and its 140,000-sale tally prompted industry gadfly Bob Lefsetz to term the record “a FUCKING DISASTER!” We’ll wait another week or so to see if the, erm, excitable Lefsetz’s predictions are borne out–if Jay falls out of the top 10 next week, we’d say it’s time for the suits at Def Jam to start sweating.

Nickelback Award For Inexplicable Durability: How long have all-Christmas format radio stations been pumping out the Yuletide tunes? Long enough to stoke the holiday spirit in people, we’re guessing, since Now That’s What I Call Christmas 3–a two-disc set that collects 36 of that format’s staples, including oldies like “The Chipmunk Song” and new entries to the genre by the likes of Celine Dion and Jessica Simpson–shot up 31%, enough to land it in the top 10, and enough to ensure that your local used-CD shop will be fully stocked with it on Dec. 26.

Incubus Ignites No. 1 On The Billboard 200 [Billboard]