Charty Chart Chat: There's Still A Party At The Top

A couple of weeks ago, Toronto freebie weekly NOW magazine featured You Say Party! We Say Die! on the cover of their annual restaurant guide with the headline, You Say Party! We Say Dine! That's cute, but it's not the only possible pun. Maybe someone can line up the Vancouver band, who rule the top 50 chart again this week with Lose All Time, to be featured in a nutrition or physical fitness magazine with an article titled You Say Party! We Say Diet! Or perhaps a scuba publication would be interested in You Say Party! We Say Dive! The possibilities are almost endless.

The previous chart-topper, Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, remains at #2. LCD Soundsystem's Sound Of Silver is riveted to the #3 spot again. Moving up seven spots to #4 is another former #1 album, Julie Doiron's Woke Myself Up. The Besnard Lakes' The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse remains stuck at #5. Do Make Say Think's You, You're A History In Rust drops a couple places to #6, while Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank jumps four spots to #7. Low's Drums And Guns rises two spaces to #8. Lesbians On Ecstasy's We Know You Know leaps 12 places to #9 and A Northern Chorus' The Millions Too Many rises four spots to #10.

Doug Cox & Salil Bhatt's Slide To Freedom enters at #21 and earns the Chart Sizzler Award as the top debut of the week. The collaborative album gained solid chart placings from five stations, including #4 at CFBU (Brock), #6 at both CHRY (York) and CHUO (Ottawa), #15 at CHLY (Nanaimo community station) and #18 at CKUW (Winnipeg). Slide To Freedom beat out more standard college radio fare, as Junior Boys' The Dead Horse EP arrived at #22, The Pack A.D.'s Tintype at #27 and Kings Of Leon's Because Of The Times at #29. Other notable debuts include Wooden Stars' People Are Different at #31, Adult's Why Bother? at #47 and, in a real blast from the college radio past, Dinosaur Jr.'s Beyond at #48.

Continuing to look at the new arrivals, two current specialty chart toppers make their debuts on the big chart, as The Locust's New Erections arrives at #35 (as well as debuting at #1 on the Metal/Punk chart) and the Stones Throw reissue of the late J Dilla's Ruff Draft enters the top 50 at #40 and moves up a spot to grab #1 on the Hip-Hop top 10. Along with Electronic #1 LCD Soundsystem's Sound Of Silver and World/Folk #1 Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra's Security at #37, four of the five specialty chart top dogs are on the top 50 chart, which is a very rare occurrence. The only specialty chart #1 absent is ZMF Trio's Circle The Path, which debuts at #1 on the Jazz/Blues chart. Another interesting coincidence is with both The Locust and ZMF Trio debuting at #1, the previous week's chart-toppers both plummet to #7: The End's Elementary on Metal/Punk and the Dig Your Roots: Creative Jazz compilation on Jazz/Blues.