This Week’s country charts once again feature the same ten albums in the SoundScan/Billboard Hot Country Albums chart.  The best thing is that the behemoth Hannah Montana Soundtrack has fallen outside of the Chart.  Taylor Swift’s Fearless once again is the best selling country release and is followed-up by Lady Antebellum’s debut album.  It is a good album but it’s nearly two years old.  Following that is Carrie Underwood’s latest platinum album, Play On, which is now on second single “Temporary Home.”  The fourth album on this list is Zac Brown Band’s The Foundation which features two #1 hits in “Chicken Fried,” “Toes” and the #2 single “Whatever It Is.”  Now they’re working on getting “Highway 20 Ride” up the charts.  Rounding out the Top 5 is Jason Aldean’s Wide Open, a record which features “Big Green Tractor,” “She’s Country” and the current hit (Written by Ashley Monroe) “The Truth.”

The second half of the Top 10 features Miranda Lambert’s Revolution, a record that features the Top 5 hit “White Liar,” now Miranda Lambert’s biggest hit of her career.  Darius Rucker’s Learn To Live is next and it could be on its way to its fifth single while Tim McGraw follows his friend Darius with his latest Gold album for Curb, Southern Voice.  The title track of the album is Tim’s 24th chart-topper of his career and his first since “Last Dollar (Fly Away)” in 2007.  Taylor Swift’s debut album is currently over the 4.6 million mark sold which, coupled with her 5.4 million copies sold of Fearless, gives her a remarkable 10 million copies sold in her nearly 4 years on the charts.  This is even more remarkable when you add in the amount of singles Taylor, who has the all-time record for most digital sales, has sold.  Rounding out the Top 10 this week is the biggest gainer, Keith Urban’s Defying Gravity. The latest single, “’Til Summer Comes Around” is looking like it might be the album’s biggest hit yet.     

Usually we do an ‘interesting’ section of the chart but this time we chose to show the next five on the Nielsen Soundscan/Billboard Hot Country Albums Chart.  Leading the way at 11 is Rascal Flatts with their latest Platinum album Unstoppable,  which now has the title track rising up the charts.  Toby Keith, whose single “Cryin’ For Me” is resonating with fans everywhere,  is at 12 with American Ride whil Reba McEntire, fresh off a four-week stay at #1 with “Consider Me Gone,” is now at 13 with her 400,000-plus sold album Keep On Loving You.  The album’s title track is now the new single just sent to country radio.  Many people speculated that Chris Young would be 2009’s James Otto, an insanely talented singer who is unable to follow-up their breakthrough chart-topping hit with another worthy single yet it seems that Young is doing just that as the title track to this week’s 14th most popular album The Man I Want To Be.  Brad Paisley’s American Saturday Night, which too has a hit single with his title-track, sits at 15 this week. 

Next week’s chart will likely look virtually the same as this week’s chart but in two weeks we’re likely to see Lady Antebellum’s sophomore album Need You Now not only appear in these pages but it will likely be the #1 album of the week in all genres.   It also signifies the beginning of country music’s ‘release cycle’ for 2010.