WEEK IN PREVIEW: VELVET’S HOT

Happiness is a warm gun, someone once said.

Well bang bang, shoot shoot indeed—maybe a hot one’s even better. Velvet Revolver’s Contraband (RCA/RMG) remains on track to snag the top chart slot from Usher, whose Confessions (LaFace/ZLG) just finished its ninth winning week.

As the sales reports are tallied and our retail analyst’s instruments are calibrated ahead of another week’s building album chart (luckily, we just got in a fresh supply of vacuum tubes), it continues to look like Velvet Revolver will debut at #1 on first-week sales approaching 250k, putting the album on top by a comfortable margin.

Throw RCA/RMG’s Avril Lavigne in the Top Five mix, and BMG is having yet another, ahem, bang-up week. The humming U.S. operation is certain to have the strudel and schnapps flowing in Gütersloh.

But it won’t be long before New Yawk steps up to represent, with the Beastie Boys’ To the 5 Boroughs (Capitol) hitting the streets tomorrow. The current betting line has the Beastie’s moving upwards of 400k in their first week, based on 1.5 million albums shipped (making them a shoe-in for the top of next week’s chart, duh). More on this as it develops.