In another slow week on the U.S. pop chart, no album tops the six-figure mark in sales, and reworked versions of pop hits continue to dominate the tally. Just a few weeks removed from when Justin Bieber led the Billboard charts with only 60,000 in sales, the latest soundtrack to Fox series "Glee" logs a second week at No. 1, racking up about 63,000 in sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan. 

"Glee -- The Music Volume 3: Showstoppers" has roped in 199,000 in sales in its two weeks of release, and keeps a comeback album from the Stone Temple Pilots to the No. 2 position. STP's self-titled effort, coming nearly a decade after the band's last, sold just under 62,000 copies. As far as '90s artists on the comeback trail go, STP logged a stronger first week than Courtney Love's recent "Nobody's Daughter," which bowed last month with about 22,000 copies sold and has since disappeared from the the top 200. 

The only other newcomer in the top 10 belongs to the Nas & Damian Marley collaboration "Distant Relatives," which settles in at No. 10 after selling about 25,000 copies. Things are expected to get shaken up next week, when easy-going beach crooner Jack Johnson will enter the chart with his "To the Sea." Billboard is already predicting that Johnson will sell in the 250,000 range, but reports that sales are still trending down about 13% when compared with 2009. 

With few major releases, things certainly seem bleak. But there's a success story or two in the making. Brooklyn noise-duo the Sleigh Bells are nesting at No. 165, but the act's "Treats" has sold 21,000 copies in three weeks of release. That number is digital-only, as the album was not made available to physical retailers until Tuesday. 

Ponder this: A band that could non-inaccurately be described as a rap-metal version of Ke$ha just played the most searing set of Friday afternoon.

Sleigh Bells is a New York duo built on oversexed white-girl rhymes, metalcore guitar riffs and redlining 808 drum beats. One of its members played in the Floridian pierced-lip battalion Poison the Well. They have every reason to be, let's say, abrasive.

But somehow all of their deeply unsubtle influences pull together in a weird way that makes them the Platonic ideal of a pan-cultural party band circa right now. A lot of this is due to producer-guitarist Derek Miller, who cracked the very fraught code of how power chords sonically interlock with samples and still leave room to breathe (or, in the case of the full-to-bursting Gobi tent, grind on anything that moves). Singer Alexis Krauss remained an absolute firecracker despite her raging sunburn: She's a nimble rapper (Sleigh Bells' debut album will come out in May on M.I.A.'s imprint N.E.E.T.), a fine falsettist and unafraid to peel off a banshee wail that Miller's old band might have envied.

Every anxious sound scratched and clawed its way to the front of the mix, but the clear winner was anyone within arms reach of a liquor shot or someone pretty to feel up. It was trashy, take-all-comers fun that also made the idea of "genre" feel as passe as a single day ticket.

-- August Brown

Photo: Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss make up the band Sleigh Bells and performed in the Gobi tent on day one of the three-day Coachella Valley Arts and Music Festival, on the Empire Polo Club grounds in Indio, Ca., April 16, 2010. Credit: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times