"Recorded in September of 1982, Celestial Love was one such homecoming. The album was also the last one released on Ra's own Saturn imprint and one of the final sessions at the New York studio that had served as a reliable Arkestra landing site for the previous two decades. Cosmic keyboard conflagrations and miasmic percussion orgies weren't the order of the day. Instead, Ra dusted off a songbook that could almost be construed as mainstream on paper, gathering a pair of Duke Ellington originals, a mothballed standard, and a handful of originals that hew to the theme-solos framework of his more terrestrially attuned contemporaries".