What Happened to Pressure 4-5?

I checked on Pressure 4-5 the other day after coming across one of their videos on Youtube. I got into them during my Sam Goody days when we received the promo for their album and were able to spin it when we wanted to, instore. They were a bit set apart from the normal glut of bands of the fading nu-metal scene of the day: they weren’t crass or edgy, and had a fun sense of melody that wasn’t always trying to add to the aggression. Aside from System of a Down’s Toxicity or P.O.D.’s Satellite, Pressure 4-5’s Burning the Process was the only popular rock album of the time that still holds up to me.

They went nowhere. Not only was Burning the Process was released a month after September 11, but the band’s label, Dreamworks Records, spent a ton of money on what was a wholly-unknown band at the time. Despite being brought on some high-profile tours, the band wasn’t able to recoup the cost:

We recorded our album at NRG studios, which cost roughly $350,000. We also shot our video at Universal Studios, which cost roughly $250,000.

Let do the math: $500,000 advance (we had a 5-piece band) + $350,000 recording + $250,000 video = $1,150,000. And we had not even hit the road yet!

Towards the end of my time in the band, I distinctly remember one of our managers telling me that we had to sell over 1,000,000 albums in order to recoup all of the money spent. In the end, we only sold 80,000.

It’s not so much that there was so much spent on Pressure 4-5, but that any amount was spent on production at all. $350k and $250k for a video are astronomically overpriced for a new band and for what was created, even at that time 20 years ago when the gear needed to record something of similar quality was still out of reach for normal consumers. Yes, the album sounded great and the video was serviceable, but for a major record label, it’s not a terribly large bite out of their wallet.

The same video could have been produced easily at a quarter of the cost, but that’s not how major labels operate. It’s not so much a matter of wasteful spending, but contracts. Dreamworks probably has running deals with all sorts of stakeholders that require the label to offer them ROFR (right of first refusal)—i.e.: “Whenever you have an album to record or video to film, you have to offer it to us first before going down the street to the next guy.” An annual “use it or lose it” budget policy from Dreamworks’ parent company, Interscope Geffen and the Universal Music Group, and having a stable of hapless newbie artists to write off as a profit loss probably have something to do with the willingness to throw all this money at a new band.

Disregarding 9/11, I had thought that the time of the year might have something to do with when an artist’s album is released. Movies, for instance, that are projected to do well are released in Q4 of the year, around Thanksgiving to the new year, when people are more likely to be on school breaks or taking the last of their vacation days, and are more likely to spend money on entertainment. The tax write-off productions are released shortly after the new year, when people are back at work or school, hungover and trying to recover from the last few months of revelry. I don’t think there are times of the year people are more likely to purchase an album more than others, but it makes sense to me that mid-level and major labels would want to release early in the year, like late winter or early spring, to generate interest for the spring and summer tour and festival season. Interest in the artist might die out by that time when a release date is in the fall, when Burning the Process was released. After looking at a bunch of random album release dates, both for well-selling and not so much, there doesn’t seem to be a pattern for the time of year being a factor.

I would’ve liked to see where Pressure 4-5 was headed. Their first release before signing, Antechnology, wasn’t a full length, but it was rather generic and underwhelming. The direction of a good producer can work wonders in some bands. They did record a bunch of demos for a second full-length, and it sounded really promising considering this would be their dreaded sophmore slump release, but the label pulled the plug, it seems, after some members quit and were replaced.