Album Sweep: December 1, 2012 - Part One...

It's time to kick off this week's "album sweep" sampling the records making their first appearance on this week's Top 200 Albums chart in Billboard magazine. In this half will be the top 15 debuting sets, with links to buy them if available online at Amazon mp3 or elsewhere...

British boyband wonders One Direction score their second #1 album of this year with their sophomore set Take Me Home, selling over a half-million copies. 

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Coming in at #3 is the soundtrack to the fifth and final film in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn: Part 2. It features songs from Green Day, Ellie Goulding, and Christina Perri's "sequel" to her song on the Part 1 soundtrack...

Debuting at #4 is the first official album from Canadian singer/rapper/songwriter Abel Tesfaye, who records under the moniker The Weeknd. Trilogy is a three-CD affair with three of his famous mixtapes...(NSFW)

Seattle grunge pioneers Soundgarden return at #5 with their first studio album in six years, King Animal. Their breakthrough album Superunknown topped the album chart in 1994.

Now all four of the Voice judges have albums on this week's album chart as Christina Aguilera's Lotus arrives at #6. Xtina has had two #1 albums, her self-titled debut set and 2006's awesome Back To Basics...

Green Day's second of their three-disc set coming out this fall and winter, Dos!, pops in at #9. Uno entered at #2 in October. The trio boasts two chart-topping albums, American Idiot and 20th Century Breakdown...

Avant-pop singer Lana Del Rey is at #10 with her Paradise EP, a seven-song set from the self-proclaimed "gangster Nancy Sinatra". It's also available as an extended re-release of her debut Born To Die album (which jumps up to #37 this week)...

 Just missing the top-10 at #11 are the alt-metal group the Deftones, with their seventh studio album Koi No Yokan, which mean's "Love's Premonition" in Japanese. Their biggest album so far was their self-titled set from 2003, which went to #2...

Scottish "Ugly Duckling"-turned classy vocal swan Susan Boyle is back at #12 with her fourth album Standing Ovation: The Greatest Songs From the Stage. Both her debut I Dreamed A Dream and its followup The Gift went to #1 in the US...

The passing of Whitney Houston earlier this year had sent a mad rush of fans to buy her records, and her Greatest Hits double-album is so far the second biggest "catalog" album of the year, behind Adele's 19. Her updated I Will Always Love You: The Best Of Whitney Houston comes in at #14...

Minneapolis-St. Paul Triple-A (adult album alternative, or "hipster rock") rock station Cities 97 sees one of their benefit CDs, Cities 97 Sampler 24: Live From Studio C jump in at #16. It features performers like Brandi Carlile, Mayer Hawthorne, Grouplove, Of Monsters And Men, Jason Mraz and more. There's only 35 thousand copies made and the only place you can get them is in certain Minnesota Target stores, where they quickly sold out, but you can try to snag a "used" copy on the internets...

The Rolling Stones celebrate their 50 years in the music business with their umpteenth retrospective, GRRR!, which collects 50 of their iconic songs from their career. The set is at #19, and that isn't bad considering they just put out Forty Licks which went to #2 ten years ago (they haven't had any big hits in the interim). The band has had nine #1 albums since the 60s, the last being Tattoo You in 1981...(NSFW - boobies!)

Staind lead singer Aaron Lewis sees his first full-length solo album, the country-tinged rock of The Road, debut at #30.

Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor's side-project, How To Destroy Angels, get their second EP An Omen on the chart at #42...

The final entry of this half at #45 is the only holiday set on this post, by The Sing-Off winners Pentatonix with their a cappellatastic PTXmas, featuring six classics done in their unique style...

That completes this half of the new stuff...out of these fifteen the three I would recommend the most are the Pentatonix, Christina Aguilera, and Soundgarden albums. I'll be back tomorrow afternoon with the second half of this week's recap, but until then, later tonight I'll have the newest in the UK on "Brit Sweep"....