It has been a few weeks since I last peeked at the Billboard album charts and really, who needs to check with the #1 album since, well, the whole summer, seems to have been the soundtrack to High School Musical 2. Who knew that the soundtrack to the first High School Musical was the #1 selling album of 2006? Crazy.

Anyway, I looked at the Billboard album charts for this week and was struck by a number of things:

• People love Christian music. No less than five Christian albums debuted in the top 100, including Casting Crowns The Altar and the Door at #2.
• People love metal. Atreyu debuted at #8 and there has been a string of top 10 metal bands over the summer.
• People love Dave Matthews Band wannabes like Ben Harper. He enters at #9.

Surprisingly (well, not really), I discovered that in the previous week, indie rock darlings Rilo Kiley and the New Pornographers put on pretty poor showings, debuting at #22 and #34, respectively. Compared to their brethren in Bright Eyes, the Arcade Fire and the Shins, this kind of surprised me. Where are all the hipsters and indie scenesters? Are they too busy at their internships at NPR or Google to go out to the shops to buy records? At least M.I.A. cracked the top 20 with Kala, but that was at #18, the same spot that Lyle Lovett debuted this week. I think we've seen the end of that revolution, thank you very much.

A few other fun debuts this week: Aesop Rock chimed in at #50, which is still too low for him. And after being in Germany, I was delighted to see the Scorpions come in at #63, even though all my German friends are baffled about why the Scorpions are popular. "They're not really that good," is what I always heard. Ah well.