Your basic Teenage Fanclub

SINCE its first album in 1990, Teenage Fanclub has gone from Scotland’s next great hope -- a group called “best band in the world” by no less than Kurt Cobain -- to artists seemingly consigned to the lives of journeymen, their sterling press notices no match for label troubles and a consciously low profile.

Wearing its influences on its collective sleeve, the band has moved from the roaring overtones of Neil Young to the crisp jangle of Big Star to the more open and rustic sound of the late Byrds and American country.

Followers since the band’s early days -- and it hasn’t always been easy -- found a common denominator in Teenage Fanclub’s heartbreaking three-part harmonies, ringing guitars and an attention to song craft. So “Man-Made,” Fanclub’s seventh album (and first since 2001), won’t deliver any sonic surprises, even if how it was made represented a departure for the band.

Its first album recorded outside the U.K., “Man-Made” was hatched in the Chicago studio of “post-rock” pioneer John McEntire, a member of Tortoise and the Sea and Cake, who was chosen based on his production work with Stereolab.

Given that the easygoing quartet had a penchant for underpinning its pop with all manner of instrumentation, “Man-Made” seemed destined to have a dense, electronic sound. It didn’t happen, says Norman Blake, one of Fanclub’s three singer-songwriters.

“Over the years, 15, 16 years, we’ve picked up all sorts of bits and pieces,” Blake says of the group’s interest in vintage equipment and obscure instruments. “And normally when we make an album we load a van up and deliver it all: old Wurlitzers, odd synthesizers and things.”

This was harder to do an ocean away. “So we basically brought a guitar each, and that was it,” Blake says cheerily. “Which was good, actually.”

As it turns out, the album sounds a lot like what the band has been doing since “Songs From Northern Britain,” the luminous 1997 LP that was so poorly distributed in the U.S. that many early fans still don’t know it was released. That is, the band sounds openhearted and American, still in love with a pop hook, with an emotional range that goes from wistful romanticism to mild disillusionment.

The new Fanclub album also arrives at a fortuitous time for Scottish rock.

Two of the founders of Glasgow’s ragged, chimey post-punk scene -- Orange Juice and Lloyd Cole and the Commotions -- have recently reissued their seminal work, while young inheritors Franz Ferdinand and Belle and Sebastian are wrapping up new albums. Still younger groups, among them Sons and Daughters, are bubbling up. Not bad for a country -- er, actually a region of Great Britain -- with a population smaller than the state of Maryland’s.

“When I was a kid I listened to a lot of punk music, but then along came Orange Juice,” Blake says. “They really broadened my musical perspective. They were self-deprecating and had a great sense of humor. And they sounded like Velvet Underground meeting Al Green. They called themselves ‘the sound of young Scotland,’ a play on Motown’s ‘Sound of Young America.’ ”

ON the whole, Blake says, the ‘80s Scottish sound was “gentler” and more romantic than English rock, with an emphasis on melody. (Orange Juice’s “The Glasgow School” retrospective was just released on Domino.)

Some things changed, Blake says. “Bands would have to move to London to seek fame and fortune. But then ourselves, and then Mogwai, and Belle and Sebastian, all stayed in Glasgow, you know, and there’s a really thriving scene here. There’s an infrastructure now. And the culmination of this is the success of Franz Ferdinand.”

What differentiates “Man-Made” from “Northern Britain” and 2001’s “Howdy!” is that it was made to be played live.

The production on “Man-Made” was intended to strip away everything that wasn’t essential, Blake says, a process the band jokingly called “under-dubbing.”

“We tried to pare things down. On some of our previous records it was a major effort to perform things live: We had 25 vocal tracks, or 16 guitar tracks.”

The band’s most famous record, 1991’s “Bandwagonesque,” had so many layers it positively shimmered. Coming out when heat around the “alternative” revolution was building, the album picked up enormous hype. Spin magazine chose the record as the best of the year, surpassing Nirvana’s “Nevermind.”

Some see Fanclub’s ensuing story -- decreasing album sales, trouble with labels, most recently Sony, which Blake calls “a nightmare” -- as disappointing. “No British indie band,” judged the Liverpool Daily Post in a recent rave, “has achieved the same kind of brilliant consistency, longevity and critical appraisal without hitting pay dirt quite like Teenage Fanclub.” A story in the Birmingham Post pointed out that “midcareer music from Glaswegian thirtysomethings with sensible haircuts” doesn’t exactly bring the majors flocking in 2005.

But, Blake says, “We’re pretty happy with the level of success we have now.”

Whether the easygoing band has ever gotten the acclaim it deserves, it somehow has survived with three singer-songwriters and no clear leader, a situation that could be dangerously unstable.

“On the other hand, there’s never pressure on one person to come up with an album’s worth of songs every year,” Blake explains. “We only have to concentrate on four or five songs each. It’s something we’re all comfortable with; some other people wouldn’t be. We’re not very confrontational people; we like things to go smoothly.”

It also surely helped that they’ve never gotten that rich, and that the band has never had the kind of driven, intense frontman that’s been part of rock ‘n’ roll from the beginning.

Says Blake: “That sounds too much like hard work for us.”

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Teenage Fanclub

Where: Knitting Factory Hollywood, 7021 Hollywood Blvd.

When: 8:30 p.m. Saturday and 8 p.m. Sunday

Price: $25

Info: (323) 463-0204 or www.knittingfactory.com