I knew I liked these guys the minute they walked in the door. Unassuming and a little scruffy, Auld Lang Syne's singer/guitarist Timothy Dick strolled into the room with a 7" record test-pressing of the band's new single under one arm and a hefty bag in the other. Inside was the record player that would bring the little record with a big hole to life. It spun, we spoke.

"I just listen to records," says Dick. "I like to watch the records spin, I like the feel of them. I think it's the most beautiful listening experience you can have."

Auld Lang Syne - Dick, his wife, Kathy, Mike Bushen, Joe Bushen, Tim Gallogly, and Jonathan Miller - is itself a beautiful listening experience. The barely eight-month-old Rochester band anchors itself acoustically around songs of epic fragility and depth. The band tumbles, caterwauls, and careens like ragged lullabies sung by weary souls with no one to sing them to sleep. Or perhaps you could call them folk tunes where the parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme is replaced by, gunpowder, tears, whiskey, and blood. The music represents a persistent loneliness tempered with a lyrical resolve and fortitude. It is an absolutely gorgeous slab of haunting, ethereal Americana.

Though hearing words like "mellow" and "introspective" may send some music fans fleeing, Auld Lang Syne is engaging with a kind of smoldering lust. I'm telling you, it ain't boring.

"We have models," says bassist Gallogly. "People who have gone before us, like Leonard Cohen. And he's not boring." And like Cohen, Auld Lang Syne is also a no-club lone wolf without a set genre to park under.

"I don't believe in genres anyway," says Dick. Yeah, neither do most bands. But let's face it, musicians are often dealing with listeners who act like kids with their vegetables; they won't eat it until they know what it is. So Dick sheds a little light.

"I feel like we're following in the footsteps of people like Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Cohen, even up to, like, Kurt Cobain," he says. "People who just did what they had to do in their time, and it was honest. Good human music."

It's the band's lyrical intensity that will stop humans in their tracks.

"I'm down to the primer, but I'm just hitting bone," Dick sings on the tune "My First Soul."

"The intense elements are the intense elements in life," Gallogly says. "Just like a fiction writer has an intense element in his books. But rock 'n' roll has an urgency, where fiction, it's all about the writer. I've read 100 of the 300 Chekhov stories, and after a point certain things start to come up and you realize he's just playing out his eternal conflicts on the stage. The only difference is with rock 'n' roll, it's out there, where with fiction you have time to hide your tracks better."

So Auld Lang Syne doesn't hide a thing, or wallow in the abstract.

"We wouldn't know how," Dick says.

"The whole goal is inclusion," says Gallogly. "You're taking the imperative to look within yourself and write. The whole goal is for people to see a piece of themselves. I don't care if you came to the show from Hannah Montana or a nursing home. Writing songs for us is not about writing for a demographic, or trying to write a generational song. It's just about being a human being."

Auld Lang Syne w/Paper The Operator

Monty's Krown, 875 Monroe Ave

Saturday, August 30

9 p.m. | $4 | 271-7050