Neil Young and The Chrome Hearts Face the Present Through the Past on Vital ‘As Time Explodes’ (ALBUM REVIEW)

Originally released on vinyl for Record Store Day in April 2025, the release in other formats over a month later clarifies how, in more ways than one, Neil Young’s live album with the Chrome Hearts is a mirror image of last year’s studio album with that band. 

Whereas Talkin’ To The Trees was full of the former Buffalo Springfielder’s observations about life as he sees it right now, from an aged perspective, As Time Explodes finds him rendering more broad, yet focused observations on our contemporary times in the context of his own history.

To that end, the album begins with “Daddy Went Walkin’,” a winsome number taken from the 2000 album Silver & Gold. Ostensibly about the passing of Young’s late father Scott–and by the time it’s over, the author’s mother as well–Neil couches such potentially painful thoughts in the familiar sounds of acoustic guitar and harmonica plus the vocal harmonies of his bandmates. 

On a comparably sensitive point is the next, similarly arranged selection, “Looking Forward.” The title tune from the eighth and final studio album by Crosby, Stills & Nash–and their third as a quartet with Neil–makes an ideal setup for the overtly sentimental “Harvest Moon.” 

Roundly acclaimed by the audience, this saccharine number is, in its own way, as much of a paean to a calamitous past as the partly-electrified, topical likes of the “Ohio” that follows; there’s no question Young’s voice wavers as he works to penetrate the distortion emanating from his and guitar partner Micah Nelson’s fretboards, but, presumably aware of that frailty in prepping this album, the weakness communicates the powerless frustration of that bygone era without belaboring the point.

A reference to our current state of affairs–plus a spooky pump organ courtesy the bandleader–pervades “Name of Love” (from CSNY’s American Dream LP of 1988). Spooner Oldham’s quick ripples of piano carry almost as much poignant relevance as the rest of this relatively quiet part of As Time Explodes, while the vaunted sessionman is also prominent through his organ playing on a cull from Greendale in “Be The Rain.” 

The metronomic drumming of this album’s associate producer, Anthony LoGerfo, rivals the steadfast timekeeping of Crazy Horse’s Ralph Molina. And it’s not much of a stretch to hear that stripped-down style as a metaphor for Neil Young’s attention to current events in his song selections here. “Long Walk Home,” for instance, is a woeful expression of despair in that regard, rendered all the more so as it follows the ranting and raving specificity of “Big Crime” (released as a single prior to the Trees LP)

Recorded on the 2025 Chrome Hearts tour, “Vampire Blues” (from ’74’s On The Beach) thus sounds positively prescient in its references to ‘good times’ and ‘sucking blood from the earth.’ But the boozy gait of the band, navigated by bassist Corey McCormick (like his partner in the rhythm section, a one-time accompanist of Neil’s in the Promise of the Real group) precludes any heavy handedness, as does its less than five minute duration.

In contrast, Young and the Hearts luxuriate in nearly fifteen minutes of “Cortez The Killer.” Taken from 1975’s Zuma LP, this is the first of three crowd-pleasing numbers, ensuring the contemporaneity pervading this album doesn’t become tiresome. On the contrary, this exercise in vivid imagination is of a piece with “After The Gold Rush,” offered in stark simplicity with the friend of CSN sitting at a grand piano to sing and warble on harmonica.

When taken together as part of the vigorous conclusion to As Time Explodes, however, those numbers are no more  indicative of the vigor in Neil Young’s recent work than the countrified jig of  “Silver Eagle.” The excerpt from the aforementioned studio album of 2025 offers an opportunity to reflect on the previous dozen cuts, but, even more importantly, the song serves as an ever-so-apt juxtaposition to “Like A Hurricane.” 

The dramatic crescendos that lead into the centerpiece of 1977’s American Stars ‘n Bars suggest this composition has never rung so true as a simple (not silly) love song for the man who wrote and released it nearly half a decade ago. Such is that depth of emotion it corresponds to the absorbing nature of the sonics overseen by producer Lou Adler with Young and his long-time ‘Volume Dealer’ collaborator Niko Bolas. Such is the palpable impact; it permeates virtually the entire seventy-some minutes of As Time Explodes.