Holiday Record Sales Race Has Suprising Turns : Pop music: Works by Lenny Kravitz, Ace of Base and Meat Loaf, which have sold well in the past, have come up short this season.

It’s easy for the recording industry to identify and celebrate the thoroughbreds in this year’s holiday season album-sales derby.

“The Beatles Anthology 1” has topped the charts since its release last month, selling more than 1.7 million copies during its first three weeks in stores. And albums by Mariah Carey, Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson and the Smashing Pumpkins, as well as the soundtrack to “Waiting to Exhale,” also have broken fast from the gate during a crowded fall quarter.

In their wake, however, the front-runners have left a few stragglers--albums that were expected to at least keep up with the pack but have fallen off the pace.

Conspicuous among the plodders, in terms of falling short of industry expectations, is Lenny Kravitz’s “Circus,” which Virgin Records had hoped would take him from star to superstar. It debuted at No. 10 in September, but has since fallen out of the Top 200 after selling 223,000 copies. His previous album--1993’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way?”--sold 1.9 million copies.

“I’m not saying that everybody was holding their breath thinking [Kravitz’s album] would do great,” says an industry observer who asked not to be identified, “but when you debut in the Top 10 . . . it’s very surprising that it’s already off the chart.”

Others that have failed to stir even close to the kind of sales expected during the seasonal buying frenzy:

* Green Day’s “Insomniac” has sold 695,000 copies since its September release, but its predecessor, last year’s “Dookie,” helped push punk into the mainstream by selling 5.8 million copies to date. After debuting at No. 2, “Insomniac” is No. 24 on this week’s Billboard album chart.

* Ace of Base’s “Bridge,” the follow-up to the Swedish quartet’s 5.9-million-selling 1993 debut, “Sign,” has sold only 191,000 copies in four weeks since its release last month and is No. 34 this week.

* Meat Loaf’s “Welcome to the Neighborhood” is No. 42 this week with only 217,000 copies sold since its Oct. 31 release. Its predecessor, 1993’s “Bat Out of Hell II,” sold 4 million copies.

* Candlebox’s “Lucy” has been a “huge disappointment,” says Bob Feterl, regional manager for Tower Records. The follow-up to the band’s 1993 self-titled debut, which sold 3.1 million copies, “Lucy” is No. 125 this week after selling 247,000 copies since its release in September.

Also lagging behind are albums of new material by such previously big sellers as Melissa Etheridge, Cypress Hill, k.d. lang, the Rolling Stones, Bob Seger, Bonnie Raitt, Dwight Yoakam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

And greatest-hits packages by Janet Jackson, Don Henley and Michael Bolton have also been moving slower than expected.

“It’s been a strange couple of weeks,” says Steve Hamilton, vice president of operations for Virgin Megastores. “A lot of people are very disappointed with [sales of] some of the new releases.”

Retailers seem most surprised by the public’s less-than-frenzied response to Green Day’s new album.

“It has been an extreme disappointment,” Hamilton says, “because everybody was expecting [sales like] the first album.”

One industry observer speculated that the Bay Area trio, fearful that its teen audience would move on to other acts if it didn’t act quickly, might have released the album too soon. “Dookie” still ranks among the nation’s 120 best-selling albums.

“A lot of that band’s fans are young,” the observer said, “and there is a whole list of artists who will tell you, ‘The young ones are fickle.’ ”

Numbers don’t tell the whole story for Bruce Springsteen’s slumbering “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” which failed even to reach the Top 10 and has sold only 216,000 copies in its first three weeks in release. The sluggish sales for “Tom Joad” have not caught retailers completely off-guard because the songs on the critically lauded acoustic album are so quiet and stark.

“We got from Springsteen exactly what we expected,” Hamilton says. “There was never any hype that it was going to be a ‘Born in the USA.’ It’s really for the core fans. It doesn’t have much crossover appeal.”

And like a lot of other records in recent weeks, “Tom Joad” has been mostly overlooked by buyers stampeding to pick up the recent releases by Brooks, Carey, the Beatles, Smashing Pumpkins and Alan Jackson, as well as older-but-still-hot albums by Hootie & the Blowfish, Alanis Morissette and TLC and this year’s holiday music champions, Mannheim Steamroller’s “Christmas in the Aire” and Kenny G’s year-old “Miracles: The Holiday Album.”

“This is a very crowded fourth quarter and some records that might have sustained better sales got hurt by that,” says one industry observer. “The one I keep hearing about is Melissa Etheridge. And Cypress Hill is another one that people felt got roughed up by the release schedule.”

Any slumping act, however, can boost its record sales by touring, and Etheridge and Kravitz are scheduled to hit the road next year.

Unlike most movies, which are all but dead if they open poorly, records are not necessarily out of the running if they start slowly in the marketplace.

“A lot of successful records throughout history have started slowly and picked up steam,” says Pete Howard, editor and publisher of the influential ICE CD Newsletter. “It’s not fair to dismiss any of these albums just because the initial weak showing is not as strong as one would have liked.”

A hit single or heavy rotation on MTV could spark album sales long after the holidays have passed.

“In the old days, if record companies didn’t see anything happening with a record in the first two or three months, they’d quit working it,” Tower’s Feterl says. “But they don’t give up like they used to. They spend a lot of time and effort working these records and sometimes it takes a little bit longer for some of them to break.”