Robley's second coming is even better than the first.

Byline: Serena Markstrom The Register-Guard

As I was lugging a heavy box through the lobby of my new condo complex, three skateboarders in their 20s, one with pink hair, stopped and stared at me before approaching the clear double doors.

As I kicked one open, one of the young men grabbed the box and asked me where I was taking it. Before long, the three were loading my car with cargo destined for storage.

Upon entering my place, the first thing one of them said when he heard music was, "Elliott Smith; cool."

Getting free help moving doesn't keep my didactic side at bay, so I said, "Actually, it's Chris Robley."

And so goes the story of the singer-songwriter from Portland who is ready to release his sophomore album, "The Drunken Dance of Modern Man in Love."

The new CD is much more Smith-like than Robley's 2005 debut: "This Is The." But the press he got for the first album often compares him to Smith, the deceased former Portland resident who broke into the mainstream when the "Good Will Hunting" soundtrack featured several of his lush, orchestral pop songs and instru- mentals.

(Smith, it's worth noting, is scheduled to be inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame on Oct. 13 at Portland's Roseland Theater. Other 2007 inductees are Obo Addy, the Crazy 8's, Tony DeMicoli and Roger Hart.)

Reached during a break from his job as the customer service manager at CD Baby in north Portland, Robley said he doesn't mind the Smith comparison. But for his first record, he felt the media comparisons to Badly Drawn Boy were more accurate.

"Drunken Dance" will be available at his show Wednesday at Luckey's. He will play with his band, the Fear of Heights, which features John Stewart on drums, Arthur Parker on bass and Rachel Taylor Brown on keyboard, accordion and vocal harmonies.

The band will play an official CD release party Nov. 9 in Portland.

"I guess I can see it loosely being relevant (with "This Is The'), but with this album I did more vocal doubling," he said. "The vocals are really upfront, but sort of hushed and quiet.

`I wouldn't want to complain about being compared to any of those people because they are all awesome."

New album is more robust

One thing that was true on album No. 1 and remains true now is that Robley's voice sounds a lot like Smith's. Yet his work never comes off as mimicry.

And the sound around that voice has matured.

Robley said the new album keeps use of synthetic noise to a minimum. The theramins, tambourines and trumpets are all played by real people. The same goes for the rest of the small orchestra of players who contributed to the 12 new songs.

So, is the increase in real instrumentation because he's made more musical connections? Maybe, he said.

Robley moved to Portland from the East Coast in 2001 with a now-defunct band. He plays in the Sort Ofs and the Imprints, and he's "kind of" joining one of Portland's better known and more charming chamber folk groups: Norfolk and Western.

Robley grew up in Rhode Island and went to Richmond, Va., to go to college. He earned an English degree with a music minor.

The English major is not surprising considering some of the ninja tricks and subtly smart word choices he uses in his songs.

Take "Centaurea," a song about how war always leads to more war, where Robley uses an image of a flower to stand for the resiliency of nature in a violent world. But to connect this imagery to place of war, the title bloom is the national flower of Germany.

Then there's "All Roads," from his first album, and "N.E. Brazee," on the new one. Both are examples of the fact that Robley is not afraid to let songs be simple lyrically.

In the first example, he basically repeats the lines "All roads lead back to you/ I don't know why, but somehow they do." He recites the lines over a pretty melody and the percussive background sounds of a typewriter clicking.

"N.E. Brazee" contains what Robley called "dummy lyrics." He likes the song, but his attempts to rewrite it to make it more literary didn't work. So he left lyrics as they came out originally.

"As soon as I saw the street sign, I got a little melody in my head," he recalled of his inspiration.

In "Faulkner's South," the lyrics came first, and they are effortlessly literate. Robley recycled the melody from an old, unreleased song.

Robley's songs are not autobiographical, but they grapple with questions about human behavior and relationships. They are more like short stories than poems, he decided.

"I think it's cool to (compress) a story into that brief time, because you have to leave out a lot of details that hopefully someone will fill out with their own thing that they bring to it," Robley said.

So when he's writing from a prostitute's perspective in "The Love I Fake," he's working out how someone can rationalize a having sex for money. Thinking about abuse in "Faulkner's South," he's not trying to exorcise his own demons.

"I think I start with pieces or fragments of other people's lives and then fictionalize them and mash them all up together, but not to tell their story," he said. "I think they are all tied to me in some emotional sense, like in 'Faulkner's South.'

`I haven't lost a parent or been abused, but it's just a case of trying to empathize."

CONCERT PREVIEW

Chris Robley

& the Fear of Heights

What: Singer-songwriter and his band

When: 10 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Luckey's Club Cigar Store, 933 Olive St.

Tickets: $3 to $5