Given a repertoire of songs that includes a conspicuous number of direct references to local landmarks — "Digging in Allston," "Boys from Brighton," and "Memorial Drive," to name three — you’d think that Tim Howard was born and bred somewhere within the bounds of Route 128. But Howard, who’s just celebrated his 25th birthday when we meet up at the Middle East to talk about his band Soltero, actually grew up in Poughkeepsie. And like many other musicians who’ve been drawn into the Boston music scene, he’s found a compelling Muse in his adopted home town. Indeed, his "Fight Song for True Love" may be one of the most ardent, if elliptical, Hub anthems ever written. "She shows no fear at all when we face Boston’s finest," he sings. "Tonight I will love you, ’til they trample us like roses/We may die but we won’t mind, because we’ll be right/We are always right."

Howard is pondering life’s vagaries when we sit down over camomile tea and IPAs. Besides the birthday, he’s just moved from Lower Allston to Inman Square and gone through a significant break-up. "I’m figuring out that life is an increasingly ambiguous thing," he reflects. "A process of blacks and whites going gray and everything just becoming more difficult, complicated, and just like harder to get a grasp on. What I really wanna do is to . . . take things head-on with ambiguities. Some of the happiest moments are also the saddest ones."

Soltero’s two albums so far, Science Will Figure You Out (self-released under the Kentuckyland label in 2001) and Defrocked and Kicking the Habit (put out last year by Providence indie Handsome Records), have found Howard giving voice (by turns a Stephin Merritt baritone and a keening Gordon Gano yowl) to that ambivalence — especially when it comes to what we talk about when we talk about love. The music of his meticulously crafted songs is full of surprises, with glints of melancholy French horn, garbled voices swathed in white noise, and tipsy accordion filling in the spaces around his spare acoustic guitar and banjo. His lyrics explore the intricacies and entanglements of romantic relationships with an affecting candor. On Defrocked, the burnished accompaniment comes courtesy of a dozen or so dexterous friends; on stage, Soltero’s more rock-friendly line-up includes Alexander McGregor on guitar, keyboards, and trumpet; bassist Ben Macri; and drummer Casey Keenan.

But Soltero is Tim Howard’s vision. "Sometimes a song spills out all at once," he says, quoting from "Bottomfeeder," one of Science’s quavering manifestos of the heart. " ‘I miss her badly, but only when I’m positive she misses me.’ That whole song wrote itself, just like that . . . It’s about a girl. Of course."

Half-joking, I ask what percentage of his songs are about women. In the same vein, he puts it somewhere around 85 percent. That may not be an unusual figure, but Howard’s vignettes are distinctively brutal in their honesty, marked both by searing moments of self-laceration and by disarmingly calm respites. For all the torturous romantic purgatory of the naked confessional "The Moment You Said Yes" (where he realizes that "We each have our ways of playing it safe . . . For example, you don’t call/For example, I act like I don’t notice when you don’t call" and that "I am missing you more than is possibly healthy and I don’t sleep"), he’s just as capable of calling up an entrancing instrumental like "Paradise City," all wafts of rhythmic, gossamer guitar.

Although Howard performs solo almost as often as he does with McGregor, Macri, and Keenan (he’ll be at the Lizard Lounge this Friday), there’s no substitute for the visceral thrill of seeing Soltero play in full-band mode, which they do once or twice every month. But when he’s off working on songs or appearing on his own, the other members keep themselves busy. McGregor will be playing the Coolidge Corner Theatre this Saturday in celebration of the release of his solo album Part One: Aguirre Returns (Eskimo Laboratories). He was born in Colombia and didn’t arrive in Lexington until he was nine. His dad was something of a folkie songwriter manqué. His paternal grandfather was a trombonist in Tommy Dorsey’s band. And his maternal great-grandfather was a wandering troubadour who one day plodded into the Colombian coffee fields, guitar in hand, and was never seen again.

But it’s another member of McGregor’s family who may have had the most significant impact on his music. It was one night after "a particularly ferocious noise band’s 20th minute of electro-feedback barrage," McGregor writes on his Web site, that he decided, "I want to make music my grandmother would have liked." He tells me, "I used to really be into free jazz and stuff that was always on the verge of falling apart. My old band [NYC’s the Ghost Exits] was like that. But that gets a little limiting. You have to deal with being ‘cool’ or being ‘dark’ or being ‘of the moment.’ But there’s something about being old-fashioned, in my way of thinking."

McGregor’s milieu is the four-track, and it’s astonishing what this self-professed "weird loner guy recording songs in my room" is able to do with such limited means. On "No Nine," a chorus of multi-hued munchkins sings "la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la" (it’s actually McGregor harmonizing with himself six times over) under a trumpet’s clarion call before slinking away to the beat of an underwater tango. The short segue track "Henreid" overlays bursts of jazzy trumpet, evoking the aural equivalent of a Jackson Pollock spatter painting. The disc’s sublime coda, "Making Movies," is a bilingual descent down misty Andean paths.

Constantly shifting, Part One: Aguirre Returns subverts expectations at every turn. Colombian bambuco music, Weimar cabaret, psychedelic Baroque, antiquated futurism, and lo-fi folk all play a part in its mélange of styles. Weird synth washes, Spanish guitars, pre-programmed beats, and piano minuets also find their way into McGregor’s compositions. As for the lyrics, he reveals his wry sense of humor in lines like "Love is not the answer/It’s just a joke from France/They made that shit up/And then they sold it to the world."

McGregor released the CD himself more than a year ago, but the Coolidge show will herald its re-release by the Cambridge label Eskimo Laboratories with the sharp-looking packaging it deserves. Last year, the Eskimo Labs released This Is Christmas, a nifty little compilation featuring songs by Soltero, McGregor, and 17 other local acts. One of these, California Stadium, a/k/a Andrew Basile, merrily recast the Pretenders’ "Brass in Pocket" as "Glass of Eggnog," and Basile too will be at the Coolidge this Saturday to celebrate the self-release of an EP recorded in 2001 called Allstate. Although bassist Jeff O’Neil and former Wicked Farleys drummer Ken Bernard do contribute their services to the EP, at the Coolidge, Basile’s only company will be tape loops. "On some of those recordings," he explains, "we had a great chemistry, and the music became less ‘singer-songwriter with a backing band’ and more band interplay. But it’s worked out pretty well for me this year, playing alone. I feel like I’ve always just been a songwriter and less of a ‘band person.’ And now I think the vocals and the melodies come across a lot better."

Basile’s songwriting can indeed bring to mind a singer-songwriter fronting a band, as in "While We’re Young," which with its breezy guitars and three-beer swagger recalls late-era Replacements. He’s the first to admit that Paul Westerberg has at various times in his life been a musical idol. But he also says he’s been listening to a lot of what gets called post-rock lately, a tendency that’s reflected in slightly skewed songs like "Raze Your Dance Hall," where surging, dark-hued arpeggios coupled with Bernard’s tricky drumming suggest something along the lines of a Fugazi song. And Allstate’s title track is a propulsive rumbler buoyed by bright choruses and pretty, chiming guitar harmonies.

Rounding out the Coolidge bill is Star Star Quarterback, a/k/a Andy Brooks. Brooks, who also plays guitar and bass in the local band Mittens, is celebrating the release of his new Spacious Phrasing (on the JP indie Metric American), a disc that finds him wresting compelling sounds from a dinky keyboard and a beat-up guitar. Many of his songs — "Love Games in the Kitchen" and "Road Houses," to name two — are electronically adorned acoustic numbers that recall Frank Black at his most twistedly inspired. But on the disc’s opener, "Singing Is a Sucker’s Game," he goes Har Mar Superstar one better, wrapping his best loverman croon around a white-boy slow jam sprinkled with synthesized stardust showers.

Star Star Quarterback is another "band" that found its way onto the Eskimo Labs Christmas compilation. And in the past, as SSQ or with Mittens, Brooks has shared bills with Soltero, McGregor, and California Stadium. "We’re all friends," says McGregor of this nascent, loose-knit collective. "Some people are in bands, some people want to put out records, and everybody goes to everybody’s shows. We all use the same practice space. We all play each other’s equipment. It’s rather incestuous.

"Boston’s a very rock-and-roll town. All the people you’re talking to in this article are much more impressed with a certain craftiness in putting together a song than rocking people out at the Middle East or wearing leather pants."

Tim Howard plays solo this Friday, June 27, at the Lizard Lounge, 1667 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge; call (617) 547-0759. Alexander McGregor, California Stadium, and Star Star Quarterback celebrate their respective CD releases this Saturday, June 28, at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard Street in Brookline; call (617) 734-2500.