Exiting the restroom of Northeast Portland’s Concordia Ale House, I’m approached almost instantly by an unassuming gentleman fingering through the magazine racks. I’m to meet up with the gifted Chris Robley at this designated meeting place, and I’m half-expecting a grandiose troubadour to saunter in with a posse of silken scarves adorning his neck, silver rings choking his fingers and a predilection for pomposity orbiting his aura. Indeed, Chris Robley and the Fear of Heights’ (essentially a cast of support musicians, but mainly just Robley) new album, Movie Theater Haiku (A Masque of Backwards Ballads, A Picturesque Burlesque), contains intrigue and mystery, like a revolving door with no one going in or out. It’s an ambitious undertaking, melding pop-rock formulas with supplements as far-reaching as theremin, marimbas, pump organ, kazoos and more, crossing over from plaintive epics to lullaby missives to silly love songs. The dreamer in me fantasizes about sharing drinks with a reclusive Elton John, not the polite, blushing figure before me. And I’m to learn that it’s the modest bent of Robley’s disposition that seems all the more to project his music into stratospheric realms.

Robley is, not surprisingly, a classically trained virtuoso. Having cut his teeth playing guitar in his high school jazz band, trombone in his high school concert band, and sifted through piano lessons as a kid, he formed a cemented base in varying spectrums of songcraft. Add to this his English degree, and short-story writing interest, and you have the seeds from which his blossoming songwriting’s been sewn. His love of writing has not been lost entirely to the thematic arc of the songs on his latest release.

“Every once in a while, I’ll write a song that seems to me to be just sort of dumb,” said Robley. “But then I have to remember that most pop music, a lot of music I love, just has nothing lyrics that just happen to work.”

Movie Theater Haiku erupts with sweeping imagery, toeing a bombastic approach to pop music, where the more layers there are to peel, the more inviting the premise of the song. The songs and stories stand on equal ground, and pave a more determined path than most songwriters dare toil over.Â

“It’s funny; a lot of the reviews I’ve been seeing mention that as being the main thing,” said Robley. “That’s good. I guess I’m not striving to be eclectic per se. The one thing I try and do is that I don’t wanna make albums that sound the same all the way through.”