Cover albums often arrive with the uneasy smell of obligation. A contractual pause between original releases. A respectful exercise in admiration. Or worse, a parade of faithful reproductions that answer a question nobody was asking. Thankfully, "Kover Kover" belongs to none of those categories. WEB WEB's first all-covers record isn't interested in paying tribute so much as testing a hypothesis: what happens when songs from radically different musical universes are stripped to their essential DNA and invited to inhabit somebody else's imagination?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is that great songs are remarkably adaptable, provided the musicians approaching them possess enough confidence to stop treating them as sacred relics.
During the last decade, WEB WEB have quietly become one of Germany's most adventurous contemporary jazz collectives. Led by the endlessly versatile Roberto Di Gioia, alongside saxophonist and flautist Tony Lakatos, bassist Christian von Kaphengst, and drummer Peter Gall, the quartet has cultivated a rare chemistry built less on virtuoso display than on mutual curiosity. Their music has always resisted tidy categorisation, drawing equally from spiritual jazz, krautrock, fusion, ambient electronics, psychedelic improvisation and cinematic sound design without ever sounding like a patchwork of influences.
Perhaps that explains why a cover album feels less like a detour than an inevitable next step.
Rather than asking, "How do we play Nirvana?" WEB WEB ask a much stranger question: "What if Nirvana had unknowingly written music for WEB WEB all along?" It is a subtle but crucial distinction. The originals become starting points rather than destinations.
This philosophy immediately reveals itself with Klaus Doldinger's "Song Of Dying". The choice is fitting, given Roberto Di Gioia's long association with Passport, but there is no attempt to recreate the original atmosphere. Instead, the melody is gently absorbed into WEB WEB's own fluid ecosystem, where harmonic openness replaces stylistic fidelity.
The selection itself deserves admiration. Jazz musicians covering jazz standards rarely surprise anyone anymore. Here, however, Grace Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, Black Sabbath, Talking Heads, Empire Of The Sun, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Joe Jackson, Grandbrothers, Eurythmics, The Dave Pike Set, and Passport somehow coexist without the album ever resembling a novelty playlist assembled by an algorithm suffering an existential crisis.
That coherence stems largely from the quartet's democratic working method. According to the accompanying notes, instruments frequently change hands during recording sessions. Roberto Di Gioia abandons the piano for bass, Christian von Kaphengst moves toward keyboards, Peter Gall occasionally leaves the drum stool, roles dissolve, habits disappear. One imagines rehearsals less as carefully managed sessions than as four exceptionally gifted musicians wandering into one another's creative territory with cheerful disregard for convention.
It shows.
"Slave To The Rhythm" loses none of Grace Jones' hypnotic authority, yet exchanges polished art-pop grandeur for something warmer and more organic. Hendrix's "Burning Of The Midnight Lamp" becomes less psychedelic spectacle than intimate meditation, while the minimalist architecture of Grandbrothers' "Bloodflow" quietly expands into something almost weightless.
Perhaps the boldest decision is "Come As You Are". Covering Nirvana remains hazardous territory because cultural memory tends to overwhelm musical possibility. WEB WEB wisely refuse to wrestle with Cobain's shadow. Instead, they uncover the composition beneath the mythology. The familiar melody suddenly reveals unexpected harmonic elasticity, almost as though it had been patiently waiting for this alternative life.
A delightful miniature version of Joe Jackson's "Steppin' Out" lasts barely ninety seconds, yet contains enough tenderness to justify its existence entirely. According to the band's own account, the arrangement emerged almost accidentally when Christian von Kaphengst began exploring its chord progression on Fender Rhodes, prompting Di Gioia to swap instruments. That spontaneous reversal of roles captures the album's entire spirit: curiosity first, ego somewhere far behind.
Elsewhere, "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" sheds its mechanical pulse without sacrificing its hypnotic quality, while Black Sabbath's beautifully understated "Planet Caravan" almost feels predestined for WEB WEB's spacious, contemplative aesthetic. Even Talking Heads' "Once In A Lifetime", a song so closely identified with David Byrne's singular nervous energy, finds fresh life by abandoning irony in favour of floating rhythmic elegance.
Throughout the record, Tony Lakatos proves invaluable. Having appeared on hundreds of jazz recordings and spent decades refining one of Europe's most expressive saxophone voices, he consistently chooses lyricism over display. Whether on tenor or flute, his contributions rarely dominate the arrangements; instead, they function as quiet acts of conversation, allowing melodies to unfold rather than announcing them.
Peter Gall, meanwhile, continues demonstrating why he has become one of Germany's most respected contemporary drummers. His playing constantly suggests motion without insisting upon it. Rhythms breathe, shift and stretch, refusing rigid definitions while never losing momentum.
The album closes with "Free", the only original composition, and perhaps the most revealing piece of all. Rather than serving as an encore, it quietly demonstrates how naturally these reinterpretations have dissolved into WEB WEB's own musical identity. After travelling through thirteen borrowed songs, one arrives at an original without noticing any abrupt stylistic transition.
There is something quietly reassuring about a band that approaches famous material without anxiety. WEB WEB neither compete with the originals nor hide behind reverence. They simply listen carefully enough to discover possibilities that others overlooked.
"Kover Kover" ultimately argues that interpretation is itself a creative act. Songs survive not because they remain unchanged, but because each generation finds new ways of hearing them. Some become louder, others slower, stranger or softer. Occasionally they become jazz. Occasionally they reveal they had been jazz all along.
Few cover albums genuinely expand the lives of the songs they revisit. This one does precisely that, reminding us that the best musicians are rarely collectors of influences. They are translators, fluent in dialects most listeners never realised belonged to the same language.