Abraham Gomez – who goes by Zemog El Gallo Bueno – was one of the pioneers of the psychedelic salsa revival back in the zeros. His surrealistically entertaining latest album, YoYouMeTu, Vol. 3 is streaming at Bandcamp. It’s a lot more African-influenced than his earlier work, with hypnotically vamping interludes slowly morphing into all sorts of strange musical shapes. Lately his home base has been Barbes, where he’s been playing an off-and-on monthly residency for the last couple of years. His next gig there is Dec 8 at 10 PM; brilliant trumpeter Ben Holmes plays beforehand at 8 with his haunting Middle Eastern-tinged trio, Naked Lore.

A balmy, bluesy horn intro opens the new album’s first track, Americae, a bad way to start: this spastically loopy, petulantly annoying red herring should have been left on the cutting room floor, Things get better from there, first with The Balance Imbalance Dance, a chirpy, trippy clave bounce that veers back and forth into cumbia, then the creepy, carnivalesque mambo Chains. “You say it’s high school? More like prison,” Gomez intones dramatically.

Motivate is a funny, subtly clave-driven parody of singsongey corporate reggaeton-pop that gets a lot more serious as the horns blaze and the groove goes further back toward Africa. A hypnotic web of spiky guitar spiced with kaleidoscopic brass counterpoint filters through the album’s title track; the band finally take it out with a George Clinton-esque vocoder break

Maria Christina Eisen’s tasty, smoky baritone sax opens Quiero Correr, a psychedelic latin soul number that looks back to the early 70s in Spanish Harlem. A lingering guitarscape introduces Sexy Carnitas – A Telenovela, the album’s funniest song: if 60s assembly-line pop bands like the Turtles really knew their way around latin soul, they would have sounded like this.

With its scrapy guiro beat and reverbtoned, slightly out-of-tune piano, Wedding Song has the feel of a 40s Peruvian cumbia – until the music goes completely off the cliff. The album ends with the rustic bomba theme Agua a Peso, then Pianola – its most epic track – which sounds like an update on an old Veracruz ballad from the 1930s. This music is as weird as it is catchy – the Barbes concert calendar doesn’t lie – and onstage the band negotiate its innumerable, unexpected twists and turns without missing a beat.