Charts: Arcade Fire open on top, Eminem set for huge debut

Back in 2010, Arcade Fire scored their first number one with The Suburbs, an album that would go on to win the Grammy for Album of the Year. The Canadian collective is back on top with their follow-up Reflektor, which opens its sales life at the top of the Billboard 200 with 140,000 copies sold. That’s a solid number, though its slightly below the kickoff week for The Suburbs, which picked up 156,000.

Of course, Arcade Fire only spent a single week at number one last time around — The Suburbs was dethroned by Eminem’s Recovery, which had returned to the top of the chart in its eighth week of release. It looks like history will be repeating itself: Eminem’s just-released The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is on track to sell between 700,000 and 750,000 units this week, which would easily give Slim Shady his 11th chart-topper and the second-biggest opening of the year behind Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience.

That would also be right on pace with the opening week of Recovery, which opened with 741,000 copies sold. Of course, he’ll fall well short of the premiere week for 2000’s The Marshall Mathers LP, which hit a staggering 1.76 million copies. Em will even fall short of the first Marshall Mathers LP‘s second week, which saw it do another 800,000. Still, Slim Shady has shown remarkable durability despite shifting cultural allegiances and mixed reviews.

Eminem also finds himself on top of the Digital Songs chart this week, with “The Monster,” his Rihanna-assisted single, selling 373,000 downloads. Depending on radio play and streaming data, those sales numbers may make “The Monster” a player on the upper echelon of this week’s Billboard Hot 100, which publishes tomorrow. You can also expect noise in that arena from One Direction, whose acoustic-tinged single “Story of My Life” wedged itself into the number two slot on the Digital Songs chart with 305,000 downloads sold.

Elsewhere on this week’s chart, Katy Perry’s Prism fell out of the top spot to number two while selling 92,000 copies in its second week. While a 68 percent drop may seem dramatic, that’s actually a pretty strong second week for Perry, as anything less than 70 percent is usually considered a victory for a pop album.

Just below Perry is fellow pop diva Kelly Clarkson, who released her first Christmas album called Wrapped in Red, which sold 70,000 copies in its first week. Like all holiday themed albums, expect Wrapped to have a semi-permanent spot in the top 10 for a while. The same goes for Duck the Halls, a Christmas album care of the cast of Duck Dynasty. It sold 69,000 copies in its first week. So well done, America.