Question: How to query for past months regardless of date

I am trying to formulate a SQL query to retreive rows by comparing two DATE columns. The end result is to compare score values from a month in the current year to a month in the previous year. While year and month are obviously easy to identify, the particular day value may vary from year to year (the last fiscal day of the month for Aug of 1997 may have been the 27th and in 1996 it may have been the 30th). "where date_column = current - 1 units year" is not what I'm looking for because that would only match 8/27/97 to 8/27/96 and not any other days in Aug, 96. I've tried some DATETIME formatting but my syntax seems to be off. Any suggestions appreciated.