Tuna Helpers: avant-girl power

The Tuna Helpers
Friday, June 24, 8 p.m.
The Murphy Arts Center
Tickets: $5 at the door

It’s safe to say you’ve probably never seen anything like The Tuna Helpers, who hail from Austin and will appear at the Murphy Arts Center on Friday.

On the band’s Web site, thetunahelpers.org, lead singer Adrienne Sneed uses this description for the band: “Cut out patches of your childhood terrors, the grandmother that soothed them, your first pair of teen-age thigh-high stockings and the sound track that played in your head when you plotted the death of your first love ... stitch them together with guitar strings and lace ... stuff it with corn syrup blood and rotten fish guts and you’ve created a Tuna Helpers doll of your own.”

The three-woman group creates music with swirling melody lines, operatic segments and atmospheric, goth-meets-pop sound. On their new album, I’ll Have What She’s Having, they take that goulash of influences and turn them into a mini-masterpiece that’s equal parts experimental and theatrical.

But even that doesn’t make The Tuna Helpers unique. Their stage show does. Puppets controlled by singer Adrienne Sneed sing songs while her sister interprets the lyrics in American Sign Language when she’s not playing keyboards.

Their whimsical choice of material — they sing about sea monsters, turtles and talking dolls, among other things, on their new disc — is enhanced by the instrumentation they use. Harpsichords and violins mix in with Adrienne Sneed’s guitar and Bethany Sneed’s keyboards to create a most unusual sound.

The group formed when Adrienne felt a need to expand her solo act in Austin. “I’d play my guitar and have these little puppets that I’d talk to,” she said in a telephone interview from Boston this week. “One would be sitting in front of a drum kit made of tuna cans, and one would be sitting in front of a horn and I’d talk to them on stage. But they wouldn’t talk back. My sister would go to the shows and sign the lyrics to the songs, and it was really beautiful.

“I like to put on a show and not just play instruments in front of people. We want to express through songs and many other mediums.”

Although it’s the group’s fifth national tour, it’s their first stop in Indianapolis. Asked to describe the band for a new market, Adrienne Sneed said, “We have a puppet theater with different puppets that sing some of the songs. We have some other theatrical things we do with props. The songs that the puppets sing are a little bit different than the other songs.”

She also refers to the group as an “all-female, pop-goth, experimental puppet-wielding band.”

Adrienne’s voice has been compared to Kate Bush by rock critics. “I guess people think of Kate Bush as being kind of freaky,” Adrienne Sneed said. She cites a few of her influences as Bush, P.J. Harvey, Pat Benatar and Heart.

Making a name for themselves in the hyper-competitive Austin music scene was no small feat. “Everyone’s pretty critical,” she said. “Everybody’s in a band already, so it’s pretty much the norm. There’s lots of competition. And what we do is slightly bizarre, so we don’t have a huge scene that comes to see us. People come by themselves, or they just come and listen and don’t talk very much, which is nice. But the bands that have a big draw in Austin are like emo-rock types of bands. I don’t know if it’s like that in every town; maybe it is. But those bands get most of the press and most of the attention, because everyone’s trying to guess what the next big thing is.”