Out Now: The L Magazine's 8 NYC Bands You Need To Hear

Yup, ladies and gents, out now is the L's third annual highly anticpated, hilariously controversial, genuinely well-researched and passionately advocative spotlight on the best new, upcoming bands in New York City, in which Music Editor Mike Conklin presents a crop of people who're doing their part to make the city's music scene (really just people plugging away at it) such a vital and hopeful place.

• Just so you can get on Hearing them right away, they are: The Lisps, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Famous Amos, This Is Ivy League, La Strada, Team Robespierre, High Places, Violens. Know them, love them, look at their pictures and see what Mike Conklin says about them.
• Plus: honorable mentions — that is, eight more bands you should hear. And we catch up with last year's crop. (Has Vampire Weekend been heard from since?)
• Elsewhere in the magazine, Edith reviews the disconcertingly monied, sanitary wine bar that's just opened up in that condo development on 1st off the Bowery, and Laurel talks about the John Varvatos outlet now occupying the former space of CBGB's. Such is what happens to neightbor estate.
• In the film section, Errol Morris goes to Abu Ghraib and Harold and Kumar go to Guantanamo Bay, and Harmony Korine goes all over the place and eventually finds inspiration from an invisible dog.