Album Sweep: December 8, 2012 - Part Two...

Welcome back, it's time to get to the second half of this week's "album sweep", where I sample the albums making their first appearance on the Top 200 Albums sales chart in Billboard magazine. You can check out part one by clicking here, and as before I've included links to buy anything you see if I can...

Coming in at #100 is the first compilation by southern rockers 3 Doors Down. The Greatest Hits contains all six of their top-40 pop hits, as well as their other major tracks. Back in their heyday in the mid-naughties, they scored two #1 albums...

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Yesterday's birthday girl, Britney Spears, sees her Playlist: The Very Best Of Britney Spears enter the chart at #111. It has ten of her 11 top-10 hits (oddly, it's missing one of her #1 singles, "3"), though "Circus" is here in a remixed version. Six of Britney's seven studio albums reached #1 on the albums chart (the seventh, Blackout, stopped just short at #2)....

National Anthem murderer Meat Loaf comes in at #116 with Playlist: The Very Best Of Meat Loaf.  The set has six of his nine charting hits (not counting with group Stoney), and all of the big ones you need to know, thankfully in edited single-length form..

Christian rock artist Jeremy Camp's first holiday set, Christmas: God With Us, enters at #116. Camp has placed three albums in the top-40 so far...

Another Christian act, Jesus Culture with Martin Smith, comes in at #123 with Live From New York...

Another Playlist title to get to the top 200 for the first time, Playlist: The Very Best Of Johnny Cash, arrives at #140. It has his biggest hit, "A Boy Named Sue", and most of his best-known songs. Cash topped the albums chart twice; with his classic At San Quentin set in 1969, and his America V: A Hundred Highways released after his death in 2009.

...meanwhile another country superstar's retrospective, Playlist: The Very Best Of Alan Jackson, is at #146. Like Cash, it's really difficult to whittle down their expansive body of work to 14 or so songs, but for the casual fan, this may do the trick, although this one just has four of the ten songs that made the top-40 on the Billboard Hot 100...

Italian opera "boyband" Il Volo jump in at #149 with their second full-length CD, We Are Love. Their self-titled debut album went to #10 in 2010...

Chris Tomlin, who won last year's Billboard award for top Christian Artist, is at #196 with his Christmas Gift Pack, which combines his three most recent albums, Glory In The Highest, And If Our God Is For Us, and How Great Is Our God: The Essential Collection into one discounted package...

The final album marking its first week on the chart is another discounted hits collection, Icon: Patsy Cline, which collects a dozen of her classic songs, with seven of her eleven Hot 100 hits...

That does it for the second half...out of these ten my top three recommendations are the Chris Tomlin, 3 Doors Down, and Meat Loaf CDs...