Self-titled CD is anything but a step back

Eight years: That’s how long it took The 88 to finally get around to dropping the obligatory eponymous release that seems to be a requirement of every upstart band. Eight years of crisscrossing the country, and the band has done a handful of international performances; but for every show it’s done abroad, it’s probably done 10 in California since the Los Angeles-based band’s formation in 2002.

But The 88 isn’t an upstart band. What’s the logic in releasing a self-titled album if not to contribute to an unestablished group’s name recognition? Why would The 88 release The 88 after already being named L.A. Weekly’s “Best Pop/Rock Band of the Year,” having its songs featured on The OC, and opening for the likes of The Flaming Lips, Smashing Pumpkins, Rilo Kiley and Matt Costa?

With any other group, an eponymous release this far into a band’s career would probably represent an effort to go back to the basics, to recapture the essence of its early sound when it was toiling away in anonymity for the sheer love of music.

That doesn’t seem to be the case with The 88. The group’s music is almost defined by its consistency from one album to the next as it’s not always possible to immediately distinguish old from new material. With a sound that remains almost completely unchanged since the band’s formation nearly a decade ago, titling a fifth full-length album something that evokes a freshman release just doesn’t seem all that necessary.

That said, The 88 — Adam Merrin (piano), Keith Slettedahl (guitar and vocals), Todd O’Keefe (bass) and Anthony Zimmitti (drums) — can’t very well be faulted for its reluctance to mess with a winning formula. At worst, The 88’s innocuous brand of soft rock is still blandly pleasant and eminently marketable — the reason the band’s songs are so often incorporated into film and television soundtracks has to be how easily they’re snatched up for on-screen action.

In any case, the band has cultivated a sizeable following in the Southern California indie music scene due in no small part to the band’s high visibility in major networks’ primetime slots (recently songs have been featured on The Hills, Gossip Girl and How I Met Your Mother).

Coming in at 11 tracks, The 88 is slightly shorter than a typical release from The 88. In an unorthodox move from the My Rocket Science label, the album was made available exclusively on iTunes on Sept. 14 with the intention of distributing it as a wide release two weeks later.

The opening track, “Center of the Sun,” was announced as the album’s first single in late August and, perhaps better than any other lead-off song, sets the tone for every song to follow. Slettedahl’s distinctive vocals and guitar are almost guaranteed to be the first and second most important parts of any song by The 88 you care to name and “Center of the Sun” is no different.

It’s an understatement to say only that the song features his contributions prominently; in truth, it wouldn’t be a song without them. In much the same way that Queen is nothing without Freddie Mercury’s incomparable vocal acrobatics — don’t get me started on that blasphemous “Queen + Paul Rogers” nonsense — it’s impossible to imagine The 88 without Slettedahl’s devil-may-care voice work.

Track two, “They Ought To See You Now,” has already been selected as the second single. The song’s hook is positively infectious, and it escapes the damning designations of “forgettable” and “easily-mixed-uppable” that can reasonably be applied to a vast majority of The 88’s work.

The best thing about the selection of “They Ought To See You Now” as the second single is that it suggests that the only factor in the label’s single-selection process is sequence in the album’s tracklisting. The pattern thus far is encouraging since track three, “After Hours,” will be named the third single. It’s the far-and-away strongest song on the album, rich in the nostalgia and sentimentality that characterizes The 88 at its best.

As a whole, however, The 88 can’t be said to characterize the band at its best: Like every other album the group has put out, it’s business as usual for the Los Angeles rockers. But as fans well know, business-as-usual for The 88 is better-than-average for most.