Boston music news: December 8, 2006

Jim Bauer and Meghan McGeary

It’s not a Billboard or even a CMJ chart. But it is a Neil Young chart, or at least a subpage on his Web site, www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday , where he (or someone working for him) tallies protest songs and videos that have been sent in. On the song chart at #18 as of this writing is DAGMAR 2’s “Give Me the Rifle,” and on the video chart at #3 is another Dagmar creation, “(To Hell With) The Commander-in-Chief.” (You can download both at www.dagmartheband.com .) Dagmar 2 are JIM BAUER (vocals/guitar/songwriting) and MEGHAN MCGEARY (vocals/percussion), a stripped-down version of the Brooklyn/Boston-based art-rock band DAGMAR, who released the EP Door No. 1 (Breathing Room) earlier this year. On that EP, McGeary — who sports a colorful wig, aviator glasses, and dragon wings in concert — plays the role of an insect goddess whose task is to motivate depressed, world-weary musician Bauer. On an upcoming Door No. 2, we can expect Bauer to break into the real world — and to be pretty pissed off about what’s going on overseas. Hence the two protest songs. “People can read their own stories into the songs,” McGeary says. “Jim intended it as a dialogue between soldiers, one of whom was going to commit suicide” but it can also be heard “as a father talking to his son, and a call to disarm.” McGeary describes the six-year-old Dagmar as a band making “surreal dreamscapes”; in Dagmar 2, she says, they “re-orchestrate songs, practically and artistically. The sound and color Jim gets out of his guitar and my percussion, there’s a lot of texture. It’s a cool sound in a different way.” Dagmar 2 play the Squawk Coffeehouse in Cambridge this Tuesday, December 14.