Idolator
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]
Comments
you know, my bandmates are incubus fans. i was all like, 'aren't they some shitty nu-metal act?'
so, they played some for me. and they're not some shitty nu-metal act. they're actually pretty good. and the bass player is REALLY good. do i own any? no, and i don't plan on it either. but they are definitely not what i assumed they were, or perhaps what they used to be. of course, the beatles didn't write 'i wanna hold your hand' the whole time, so bands evolve i guess. at least they are playing instruments, you know? maybe later they will get in to making clothing and endorsing booze and hanging out with dale jr., but for now they are actually making music. you know, with guitars and that. and that is fine by me.
I think SCIENCE is a really good record. The rest of their stuff goes from meh-plus to meh-minus chronologically. I saw them open for Sabbath and Pantera in '98 or '99. They didn't embarrass themselves.
i actually like incubus; i was more surprised by the album's no. 1 debut because of the almost-complete lack of advance promo, aside from 'anna molly' charting on modern-rock radio. i seriously wonder how many of their fans even knew that the record was out this week.
Maura: You (it was you, right?) asked me last week about Incubus, and I admit I was pretty dismissive. (But then, I had Clipse hitting the top five and possibly even #1, so shows you what I know.) So, good show for you.
Not that I'm not eating major crow this week, but...look at that total: 165K?! Even Billboard points out that that's less than half the first-week total of their last debut (A Crow Left of the Murder, 2004, 332K debut).
In short, Incubus underperformed - especially for the middle of the holiday season - but the headline this week is Jigga. An EIGHTY PERCENT drop? I'm sorry, even with a big first-week total, that's a jaw-dropper, and there's no explaining that away. Nobody this year who debuted with more than 500K in week one - not his girlfriend B, not Trousersnake, not Rascal Flatts - dropped that much in week two. This is a scandal.
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