the slide rule slip and succumbed to sensuality. His guerrilla days as the post-Marxist irritant of his peculiarly capitalist trade [...] aren't completely lost, of course. He's still aware of the irony of his role, and nagging snatches of guilt and cries of conscience continually pepper Cupid, subverting its aims." The review concluded that "as a free-standing product, this is pop as it should be: smart, sweet but not sickly, rich and seductive, exotic, teasing, tempting and, judging by its persistent insinuation onto my Walkman, a durable, desirable thrill". Awarding the album "4¾ stars out of 5", Sounds wrote, "If you only indulge yourself in one smooth, non-alternative, chainstore pop album this year, make it this". However, NME dismissed Green's wordplay as insincere: "In his pop music, he plays with the language of the medium, both verbal and musical, in a way which implicitly criticises the way the language was used originally... Unfortunately, when this kind of post-modernist dissection is applied to affairs of the heart it can't help but come across hollow and artificial, because it's getting further removed from the business of actually moving, of authentic emotional experience." In the US, Spin stated that "no disco was ever this sublime" and that Green's mixture of pop music and intellectualism "benefits us by teaching us the vocabulary of emotion. Green's gilded, fabricated palace of sentiment makes you want to know more about these matters even as his clever-dick wordplay, woozy vocals and slick manipulation of modern dance music's subtlest syncopations lead you onto some empty dance floor of the soul." Writing for The Village Voice, critic Robert Christgau wrote that "the high-relief production and birdlike tunes and spry little keyb arrangements and hippety-hoppety beat and archly ethereal falsetto add up to a music of amazing lightness and wit that's saved from any hint of triviality by wordplay whose delight in its own turns is hard to resist." Rolling Stone was cooler towards the record, acknowledging that Scritti Politti's new direction worked well on "Wood Beez" and "Absolute", but that "the rest of Cupid & Psyche 85 isn't deviant enough. Green has absorbed the lessons of dance masters like Arif Mardin so well that he often imitates the very formulas he seeks to undermine... Stylishly wrought, at times delightfully eccentric, Cupid & Psyche 85 is ultimately too true to its form to be genuinely subversive." In a retrospective review, AllMusic