Mates Of State are as much a staple of high-school nostalgia as senior pranks, class rings and letter jackets. Their new album, Crushes (The Covers Mixtape) (Barsuk), lives up to their image. “Love Letter” is the Mates’ melancholy, slow-burning rendition of Nick Cave’s original. Flickering bonfires cast haunting shadows onto the husband-and-wife duo of Jason Hammel and Kori Gardner as they summon their latent teenage angst from decades past and channel it through their sweetly choked vocal exchanges and keyboard tones. You come away feeling like you checked your old yearbook for the first time in seven years and saw the heart circled around your first love.
