Good news for Scottish music fans this week - Kevin Buckle

While the big news from a Scottish artist this week is the release of the Lewis Capaldi album, there has been lots of other news about Scottish artists of great interest to Avalanche in recent weeks.

Withered Hand, aka Dan Willson, is one of the most acclaimed artists on the Edinburgh music scene.

At the end of last month was the release of the new album from Withered Hand How To Love.

The vinyl will not be ready until the summer and the CD is already running low, though sadly all this information was gleaned from Bandcamp as the album has not been available in shops. While this is often the way of things these days it is a very limiting way to handle new releases.

Out the middle of last month was a new single from Edinburgh band Broken Records called You Won’t Be There. No firm release date for the album yet beyond later in the year but hopefully Avalanche will have that one in stock come the time of release.

Already available to pre-order on Bandcamp but also promised to be available from “all good record shops” is the new Meursault album with a release date of 7 July. Currently there only appears to be vinyl and a download that can be ordered.

As if all that isn’t enough Camera Obscura have two of their early albums Underachievers Please Try Harder and Let’s Get Out Of This Country reissued on 30 June on the Elefant label.

All the artists mentioned here apart from Lewis have albums in the Avalanche top 40 best- selling Scottish albums of all time, so all this should be really big news for us but unfortunately by the time the labels and artists all take their cut there will be little left for us these days.

As I’ve explained before, the real losers in this scenario are the new local artists, as when customers come in to buy these releases they often ask what other local bands we can recommend.

We do still get people in from all over the world wanting to say they have bought albums by Scottish artists in the shop, with Belle and Sebastian and Frightened Rabbit heading the list followed by Mogwai and The Twilight Sad.

Of course, Avalanche is known for far more than just our support of Scottish artists and we had a very happy couple from Hawaii in this week buying the new Metallica album.

They were lucky enough to get the last bag of freebies we had, which involved a tote bag, a print, a window sticker and a pack of guitar plectrums. They were so excited they asked to have their photo taken with the goodies and it was great to see the joy the surprise gave them.

I’m often asked why we don’t make more of a fuss about the things we give away but to be honest we have a loyal customer base, particularly among the kids these days, who were over the moon with their free Harry Styles posters for the last album and were ecstatic to get their Taylor Swift posters on Record Store Day, so there is no need to create more demand.

Speaking of freebies we do have a bunch of giveaways for the new Lewis Capaldi album including posters, T-shirts and tote bags.

We also have a lifesize cardboard standup, but the less said about that the better!