P&M is a great album...one of my favorites. Just listened to it today actually.
It's an amazing record, no question. I remember when I first heard it I was pleasantly surprised by it's heaviness and raw aggression of Caffery's riffs, and the return of Jon as a full time vocalist was a highlight too. In fact, I would argue that in his effort to make up for the loss of Zak, in combination with the vocal training he took after he lost his voice in '92, his performances on P&M are among his most varied and impressive of his entire career, nearly on par with his material from the Gutter Ballet/Streets era.
With that said, within the context of the greater Savatage/TSO discography, the album does sound very outside of the proper sequence of time and space. On the one hand, the very riff based nature of the album and the fact that Jon is the only singer is reminiscent of "classic" era 'Tage (1981-1992). On the other hand, though, the album has many attributes that are very distinctly post-Handful Of Rain era 'Tage: Criss Oliva's absence is very noticeable (Caffery makes up for this, of course, but he has his own style which is distinct from that of Criss Oliva's), many of the song structures themselves are much more typical of post-1994 Savatage (counterpoint vocals in Morphine Child, the end section of Surrender, pretty much all of Back To A Reason, to name a few), and the fact that Paul wrote all of the album's lyrics and vocal melodies is also rather obvious, which is another distinct trait of later Savatage. As such, the album really sort of stands on it's own away from the rest of their discography. It can't really be placed with the classic era 'Tage because the lineup and writing is very different, and yet, it doesn't really fit in with later 'Tage and TSO because the vocals and the approach to music is completely separate from everything else the band has done from Dead Winter Dead onwards (the TSO albums included).
Overall, though, that just makes the album all that much more special, because it truly is a world all unto it's own, not beholden to any specific era of the band's history and simply defying attempts at classification with the greater Savatage legacy.