Kasabian, De Montfort Hall, Leicester <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

Leicester City Football Club's retainer, a pensioner who plays the trumpet at the beginning of every home game, heralds the home-town start of Kasabian's tour. They are the biggest band from here in years - at this summer's V Festival, it was Kasabian on the second stage that caused yawning gaps in headliner Morrissey's crowd. Their second album, Empire, and its booming title track have turned them from Stone Roses-aping also-rans into contenders. But a lack of substance still haunts them, even here, among their own.

The sheer size of their sound can sweep you away, at first. The hollow smack of drums is massive, most of all on "Empire" itself. It is a song about might, announcing in its title the ambition Kasabian have stoked up for themselves. A dramatic swipe of synth-strings repeatedly returns you to its trampling chorus. The lyrics are something about not wasting lives, but irrelevant compared with the primal tension and release of the music, combining the aesthetics of dumb-yet-brilliant pop, an ecstasy rush and a football chant - a formula patented by Oasis a decade back.

But as the visceral impact of this sound begins to fade, I search, in vain, for anything else. Kasabian have no charisma, certainly not in singer Tom Meighan, who seems overwhelmed by the affection from the home crowd, acting like a fan who has sneaked on to the pitch to kick the winning goal. This underdog mentality continues when he dedicates "The Doberman" to "strugglers", but is at odds with Kasabian's triumphalist sound.

Serge Pizzorno, the band's saturnine main songwriter and guitarist, tries to add softer detail when he sings on the heartfelt acoustic strum of "British Legion", dedicated to Leicester's recent war dead. But his pinched nasality combines the worst of Dylan and Lennon, minus their lyrical compensations.

"Processed Beats" is far more typical. All you see is a row of lads with guitars, but all you hear is the saurian howl of simulated Seventies electronics, maximised by 21st-century technology. By the encore, everything has been racked up still further, as if Kasabian are striving for some ultimate volume and scale.

By the climactic "LSF", the feeling remains that this is an ordinary band overcompensating with the scale of their sound, until size alone has become the music's content. It leaves me empty.

Touring to 22 December (see www.kasabian.co.uk)