[3] Slates made its first appearance on CD in 1992 on the Dojo label, where it was coupled with live album A Part of America Therein, 1981, at the time these being two of the hardest Fall releases to find.

[11] AllMusic gave it four stars, with David Jeffries writing "Not a bad taster if you're new and want some post-punk, pre-pop Fall – and 90 percent of this is prime material.

"[4] Trouser Press commented on the improvement in production compared to Grotesque (After the Gramme), calling it "A solid record of greater potential appeal than just to cultists.

Situated between the "callow punk-bandwagon promise and bad haircuts" of their early career and the "classic and even generically classic work" that would follow, Sinker wrote that Slates captures the Fall at the moment when "Mark E. Smith's unfooled bile seems perfectly dialectically visionary, wearily energised, utterly untimely: his un-musicality a higher music.

'Naive' anti-design sleeve design, rhythms that jerk along like speedheads addicted to paranoia side-effect; a guitar-sound jabbing barbs into your skin, razor-edge squeals into your head—Man With Chip's voice yabbers scarily on through a thick fog of textured noise.