Album Sweep: August 3, 2013 - Part One...

It's time to start up the first half of this week's "album sweep", where I sample the records spending their first week on Billboard magazine's Top 200 Albums chart. As usual, I've included links to buy anything you see, but if you can please go down to a real record store and show some love.

The week's biggest-selling album for the second frame is Jay-Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail, which sells more than 150K this week.

Arriving in the runner-up position is singer/songwriter/awesomeness Sara Bareilles, whose The Blessed Unrest becomes her third top-10 effort (all of her major-label releases). In 2010 her last set Kaleidoscope Heart topped the albums chart...

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The 24th installment in the Kidz Bop franchise of 'sanitizing' pop records see an entry at #3 on the chart this week. 17 of them have made the top-10, with five of them reaching #2 (numbers 9, 19, 20, 21, and 23). This one massacres songs by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, The Lumineers, and Taylor Swift, among others. Your ears will bleed...

...and 180 degrees from that is rapper Ace Hood with his fourth full-length regular release, Trials & Tribulations. It's his second to make the top-10 and biggest so far...(NSFW)

And turning 180 degrees back, the soundtrack to the Disney TV movie Teen Beach Movie surfs in at #8...

Tween Tiger Beat fodder Cody Simpson from Australia scores his first top-10 effort with his second full-length album Surfer's Paradise...

Singer/songwriter Matt Nathanson arrives at #16 with his eighth studio set Last Of The Great Pretenders. It's his second to make the top-20 and highest rank so far...

Aussie hard rock group Sick Puppies also get their highest position as they debut at #17 with their fourth full-length effort Connect....(NSFW)

Iconic electro-pop duo Pet Shop Boys get their seventh top-40 album in the US as their first self-released album Electric enters at #26. So far their biggest album remains their debut Please which topped out at #7 in 1986...

R&B veteran Ronald Isley's third solo album apart from the Isley Brothers becomes his first to make the top-40 as This Song Is For You comes in at #27. With his brothers he topped the album chart twice with The Heat is On in 1975 and Body Kiss in 2003...

Blue-eyed soul man Mayer Hawthorne is a personal favorite, and I'm stoked that his new album Where Does This Door Go comes in at #30. His last, How Do You Do reached #52 in 2011...

Phillip H. Anselmo & The Illegals, featuring the former lead singer of metal giants Pantera and Down, enters at #35 with Walk Through Exits Only....(NSFW)

Baton Rouge, Louisiana is where rapper Kevin Gates is from, and his first official album Stranger Than Fiction debuts at #37...(NSFW)

That does it for the first half of the new crop....lots of good (and godawful) stuff here, but the three I'd pick first are the Sara Bareilles (GET THIS), Pet Shop Boys (DITTO), and Mayer Hawthorne (ALSO, TOO) sets...

I'll be back tomorrow with part two, with new stuff from a couple of Dixie Chicks, a blues-rock fave, and possibly the bravest comedian ever.