The glut of reissues that started with the CD boom has created a gigantic musical flea market for many young bands, and they're coming up with some exciting finds. It's part of the recycle-and-recombine aesthetic pervading a slacker culture that lately favors whoever can find the coolest pair of vintage '70s Pumas.

Teenage Fanclub, a Scottish guitar quartet with three albums of raffishly endearing guitar pop now behind them, are among the best recyclers around. Thirteen evokes early-'70s Anglo or Anglophilic power popsters such as Badfinger, the Raspberries and Big Star but imbues those sounds with postpunk's characteristic velocity and ragged edges, as if to show how much faster and more confusing the world has become in the past 20 years. The songs bristle with musical references – the irresistible opener "Hang On" starts with a rip from T. Rex (by way of Nirvana), the meowing slide guitars on "The Cabbage" are an homage to George Harrison, while the closing "Gene Clark," a mystical ode to the late Byrd, sounds like a lost track from Neil Young's Zuma.

Far from the crude noise and polymorphous aggression that dominate indie rock, Teenage Fanclub's immensely tuneful sing-along anthems recall the pure joy of bouncing around one's bedroom to giddy pop love songs. The simple lyrics are worthy of '70s AM pop – as bassist Gerard Love sings on "Fear of Flying": "Don't have to paint no words with thoughts that don't belong/I've never looked for answers in a song."

Thirteen is even sweeter than its predecessor, the sterling Bandwagonesque (1991): The guitars are more meticulously massed, and the Fanclub have beefed up their dulcet harmonies. The band co-produced, which might explain the sometimes endless fade-outs or why the incorrigible romanticism occasionally turns treacly. Both tendencies reach an apogee on "Norman 3," when guitarist Norman Blake repeats the chorus line "Yeah, I'm in love with you, I'm in love with you/And I know that it's you" 11 times.

Minor flaws and all, Thirteen is more proof of the miraculous way that rock's innate cannibalism brings about its continual reinvention – as one band put it, pop will eat itself. And as Teenage Fanclub prove, the rotting flesh still tastes sweet. (RS 669)

MICHAEL AZERRAD