Auld Lang Syne

Auld Lang Syne has slowly and steadily built a reputation for crafting stunning songs that are lyrically incisive, haunting in melody, and timeless in their arrangement. Though they toured for years as a full-blown rock band, sharing bills with indie luminaries like the Avett Brothers, These United States and the David Wax Museum, their current focus is more like something you might hear wafting from the door of a medieval cathedral. The songs themselves are still very much of the earth- hymns to impermanence and heartfelt pleas for authenticity in human relationships. But for now the band has traded in its electric guitars for a bevy of backup singers; vocal harmonies now weave and dart like a confluence of sparrows through the chords and baritone of lead singer and songwriter Timothy Dick. His songs have the kind of breathtaking imagery you don't usually find outside of good fiction, much less layered with prayer-like intensity- supple harmonies: "Your eyes sparkle while the carousel spins/ Pink mums blossom like a long-lost friend/ And It'll all startagain when the day is done/ Like aprons hanging in the morning sun." Dick's wife Kathy is a songwriter in her own right, crafting elegant elemental songs that quietly do their work without drawing attention to themselves, like the natural world from which she draws her inspiration. Like a tree that feels the cold and sends its energy down into the roots, Auld Lang Syne left the bright lights, the sleepless van rides and dressing room hand-wringing of a rock band on the rise behind. The Dick's packed up and left Rochester NY, embarking on a year long Woofing (willing workers on organic farms) odyssey and eventually settled in the sleepy central NY countryside. But if the recent crop of shows are any indication, the band is undergoing something of a renaissance. The time spent underground has not been wasted.