​Now listen here – Summer Moon is a fine new album - Kevin Buckle

​I’ve been playing an advance copy of the new There Will Be Fireworks album Summer Moon all this week getting ready for its release yesterday and was pleased to have several people ask what was playing.

There Will Be Fireworks

Selling albums by playing them in the shop, of course, was made famous in the film High Fidelity when record store owner Rob Gordon, played by John Cusack, tells his co-workers that he will now sell five copies of the Beta Band album Three EPs by playing it in the shop.

For Avalanche this was never shown more to be the case than in the mid-nineties when Dublin band Whipping Boy released a stunning album, Heartworm, which we sold hundreds of in our West Nicolson Street shop next to the university. The album, though, did not sell as well as expected elsewhere and their record company Sony asked why we were selling so many.

The answer was quite simple. Each day around four o’clock as most of the students and nearby office workers were in the shop after finishing for the day we played the album.

These days things are a little different. We do still get people asking what we are playing but the most common reaction then is to say they must go away and listen to more.

It certainly helps singing in a distinctive Scottish or Irish accent, but in particular since moving to the Waverley Market, it is amazing how people are drawn to a distinctive vocal of any kind with Leonard Cohen and Matt Berninger of The National big favourites.

Sometimes it can be the quality of the songs rather than the vocal and several times I have sold a Babybird CD when playing it in the shop.

Of course, a Scottish or Irish accent alone is not enough and they have to be great songs too, which is why we have sold so many albums by Frightened Rabbit and The Twilight Sad this way and Fontaines DC have followed in the footsteps of Whipping Boy.

While There Will Be Fireworks are hardly prolific, with Summer Moon being only their third album in almost 15 years, they have a very loyal fan base and while these days we will lose a lot of sales to their Bandcamp page, there are still many loyal Avalanche customers who will prefer to keep supporting the shop and, of course, it will be one of our top recommendations every time we are asked by visitors for advice.

There have been many great debut albums by Scottish bands and far fewer have gone on to produce a second album of the same quality, but in the world of Avalanche the only Scottish bands until now to have maintained that quality over their first three albums have been Belle and Sebastian and Meursault who are now joined by There Will Be Fireworks.

The shop is having a minor refit this week adding extra space for CDs as well as six new vinyl racks and doubling the space for posters.

And the rain forecast for next week will guarantee the shop will rarely be empty and often be full so you can be sure I’ll be seeing how many copies of Summer Moon I can sell by playing it.