Murray's voice is the record's great trump card. She has the kind of soaring, unforced range that lesser bands would have buried under studio gloss, but Maag — clearly a man who understood restraint — lets her breathe. On "Staying With You," the ballad that became the album's calling card, she navigates the melody with the patience of someone who knows exactly how far to let a phrase travel before reeling it back in. It's a love song, certainly, but not a saccharine one; there's a weariness in the lower register that suggests she's lived a little before singing about soulmates.
Shumway's keyboards and Roos's guitar lines spend the record in a kind of polite negotiation, neither quite willing to dominate the other, which gives songs like "Wings to Fly" and "My Fantasy" their slightly wistful, see-sawing quality. Dale Sandberg's bass — he moonlighted as Maag's studio assistant, a useful vantage point from which to shape a record's bones — anchors things without ever drawing attention to itself, while Jeff Francom's drumming, reportedly delivered while he sang harmony simultaneously, a parlour trick worthy of its own footnote, keeps the tempo honest rather than showy.
"Eternal Flame" and "Desert Sky" lean harder into the band's more elemental preoccupations — love, loss, the desert itself as a kind of emotional weather system — and it's here that the album's small-town, unhurried character becomes most apparent. These aren't songs reaching for the charts so much as songs reaching for the people already in the room, which may be exactly why the Deseret News reached for the phrase "a breath of fresh air" on first listen. It was a fair assessment then and remains one now.
The deeper cuts only confirm the impression. "No Matter What" and "Shattered Lives" carry a harder edge than the singles suggest, Roos's guitar finally allowed to push rather than negotiate, while "Here You Come, Here I Go" plays like the album's restless cousin, all momentum and no resolution. "Waves" is the most overtly atmospheric thing here, content to drift rather than build to anything, and "Hillary's Lullaby" — tucked away near the record's close — is a small, unguarded moment that feels less like a song written for an audience than one written for a single person in mind. It's the sort of track a band only includes when they trust the people they're recording for.
"When the Days Get Hot" and "Take My Hand" round things out with a lighter touch, proof that the band could shift gears without losing the emotional thread that runs through the whole record. None of it sounds remotely calculated. If anything, "Definition" suffers occasionally from too much sincerity and not quite enough mischief — a band so pleased with the songs they'd written that they recorded a full album before playing a single show might have benefited from a rowdier crowd to sharpen the edges first.
But sincerity, delivered this well, ages strangely gracefully. Roos was gone within a year, the band itself dissolved not long after, and "Definition" might easily have vanished into the great pile of regional curios that never make it past a CD pressing. That it didn't — that it's back, intact, voice and all — is, on the evidence here, no bad thing.